Because I have myself 10-50x my productivity and I have close to 20 years of experience in dev, and I'm able to manage 50 repos at once (with heavy adversarial in loops and many other automated procedures e2e, regressions and everything you can think of), spent about $50K in tokens lately (+ many subscriptions). I also have a grid of 8 monitors where windows are automatically switched to ask me questions non-stop, I'm a "bot" yes :p, but I've never been able to even dream of managing projects this big while maintaining consistency and quality.

I say it's counterintuitive in the sense that for a business, the "sheer" output now possible, not just in code... but in marketing automation, documentation, testing, prototyping which brings you competitive advantage that just can't be compared, I understand that you can still make money without AI, but if you can, you can also make so much more money with AI, it's not only about the money, it's also that you can solo handle complex projects (assuming you have the mental bandwidth to manage 30 threads in parallel).

I completely respect the OP's position for personal projects and hobbyist work but I don't see how you can make more money without using AI, quality of code (but even this, I'd argue that 20 rounds of adversarial with 10 models is not really beatable) is rarely a success factor in business.