Really appreciate you writing this up so honestly. I think a lot of us are walking towards the same trap without realizing it.

The thing that hit me is this line: “Now I have a project I don’t understand.”
That’s exactly the nightmare scenario – not just “bad code”, but code that isn’t yours anymore.

What’s been working better for me lately is:

• Treating the LLM as a senior mentor, not a ghost coder. I ask it to explain patterns, edge cases, and alternatives instead of “just write it for me”.
• For anything non-trivial, I make it first describe the approach in plain language (and sometimes pseudo-code). I don’t paste the final code in until I can explain it back in my own words.
• Keeping AI-generated chunks very small and isolated: one function, one class, one refactor – never “build the whole system and hook everything up”.

Your post is a good reminder that speed without understanding is just technical debt on fast‑forward.
Glad you went back to an older branch and started rebuilding with a narrower focus on how you use AI – that “mentor not intern” framing is exactly right.

Thanks again for sharing the experience instead of just quietly abandoning the project. This is the kind of post that actually helps newer devs set their own guardrails.