I mean... there are many situations in life where people are bad judges of the facts. Dating, finances, health, etc, etc, etc.
It's not that hard to imagine that your friend feels more productive than she actually is. I'm not saying it's true, but it's plausible.
The anecdata coming out of programming is mostly that people are only more productive in certain narrow use cases and much less productive in everything else, relative to just doing the work themselves with their sleeves rolled up.
But man to seeing all that code gets spit out on the screen FEEL amazing, even if I'm going to spend the next few hours needing to edit it, for the next few months managing the technical debt I didn't notice when I merged it.
It's not that hard to imagine that your friend feels more productive than she actually is. I'm not saying it's true, but it's plausible. The anecdata coming out of programming is mostly that people are only more productive in certain narrow use cases and much less productive in everything else, relative to just doing the work themselves with their sleeves rolled up.
But man to seeing all that code gets spit out on the screen FEEL amazing, even if I'm going to spend the next few hours needing to edit it, for the next few months managing the technical debt I didn't notice when I merged it.