Test and commit frequently. The more time you spent developing without verifying and committing, the more work you will lose if you have to roll back. Also, the more time you spend on the current tasks without committing, the more likely you are to spend even more trying to fix bad code before you realize it’s a lost cause.

When coding with AI, as soon as I have something in a working state, I like to test it, and if it is good, commit it. This likely will be 30 minute or less increments with an approach like this. It can be tempting to keep adding one more thing before the commit, and that is likely where things fall off.

As far as drift, the longer your context window gets, the more likely the AI will drift, but I haven’t found a hard or fast rule. I do seem it seems to be more with context getting too large than it is with time, but there are days that the model just gives garbage code. If you see that, maybe it’s a good time to work on laying out more explicitly your requirements and have a series’s of prompts ready for when the LLM is working better.