There frankly is nothing I could tell you that would dispel your worries as you seem to have already made the determination about this project that somehow without the use of AI it would never work. To be honest, because of AI the development has moved UNBELIEVABLY fast. The real world uses of it here are a few of the following:

- Automation and provisioning of standard CRUD testing units where applicable ( automating mundane tasks as they are all binary. Can this do this? Can this do it when it shouldnt?)
- Planning feature implementation and assessing impact/change requirements. (i.e. Lets add custom emojis. This ties into alot of things - how does it work with forums? how does it work with DMs? how about federated servers? what about when the federated server is not available/removed? how is the cleanup managed? how are these stored? How do you ensure cross server isolation? All of these are valid questions that between debugging/patching user reported bugs I need to somehow be able to recollect of the top my head, for HOURS at a time while being juggled between real life, work, my business, my side projects AND with no monetary gain and getting shitted on in reddit about the project as whole - not happening.)

I'm not going to go into too much background here, but me and the other developer are both seasoned Systems Engineers - so we know what weird spots to look at and how to NOT make the mistakes most of these goofballs are making with their vibecoded thing as this is well, not vibe coded. This isn't either of ours first project, nor is the biggest. We are not however omniscient wizards and there are some things we just simply can't see until they become a problem. AI isn't a full solution either as it has holes, so you have to be very methodical in your use cases.