How are you measuring efficiency? They're better than most humans, which is what I would need more of as a substitute.
Of course I could do all of my coding alone again, but I would be slower. It's like walking to the mall several times per week, several hours per time, instead of once or twice per week with a car, three cumulative hours. I trade a higher energy consumption for more time to do other things and the ability to live far away from shops.
Counting the 100w for 24 hours for a human doesn’t match up with counting the power usage from “AI” for only the 10 minutes it’s doing a task.
Also - units issue: 100 watts for a day is 2400 watt-hours. It’s a moot point anyway because the power draw for the frontier models is an order of magnitude off that the division by 24 is basically meaningless.