Sr Eng AI Coding project crash-out

I’m 4 days into an afternoon project … Like Icarus, my codebase is irrecoverable. A tangled heap of wing fragments and melted wax, dripping with half-baked ideas and unsupervised AI chaos. My grand vision of outsourcing grunt work to AI had sent me soaring, but the sun of reality burned away any hope of landing gracefully.

I feel you nemo. This silly little micro blog I thought I could whip up with AI (the api gateway portion). But alas it took me fragmented hours over several weeks before I finally understood enough to accomplish what I want.

I too suffer now from a messy codebase that is need of organization and refactoring. The seduction of AI is that it gives you one neat file to accomplish everything, not realizing modular code is superior to assembly.

I’m glad you found some success with brute forcing a React upgrade at work, but agreed, for personal projects learning is king.

_{Quote Citation: nemo, “My Afternoon Project Turned Into Four Days of AI Lies, USB Chaos, and Hard Lessons”, 2025-01-26, https://nemo.foo/blog/day-4-of-an-afternoon-project}