I've shipped more in the last few months than at any point in my career, and I've never been this tired at the end of a day. Both are true, and the relationship between them is the part nobody's writing about. Some of it is my own doing — when attempting something costs almost nothing, you attempt everything, and I've been a kid in the candy store. The rest is structural. The boilerplate, the builds, the Googling: never the valuable parts of my day, but they were the low-intensity parts, and removing them leaves a concentrate of pure judgment with the rest stops engineered out.
It's an operational problem rather than a personal one. Tripling output can quietly mean tripling cognitive load, and that doesn't show up on any dashboard. I've stopped reading the exhaustion as a sign I'm doing it wrong.