Using an agentic coding assistant would be the first step (there are many, Cline, Claude Code, Gemini CLI and various others) as those can traverse the code base, execute tests, run queries or web search and feed the outputs back into itself to validate correctness of whatever the agent has created/done.

You won't need to set up this stuff for an hour every time, you set it up once and then you just give it commands.

The skill ceiling is deceptive, it feels very low at first (after all, it's just natural language, right?) but getting an intuition for where these tools work best and where they break down, how to task them, what to include in the instructions, it takes a bit of using them first.

That said, if you're a code maximalist, if you get most enjoyment out of hand crafting code or of you don't feel comfortable communicating effectively or delegating work, then maybe these tools aren't for you.

At this point in time I'm also pretty much over proselytizing anyone, I get a TON of value out of this stuff, but everbody has to find their own workflows.

How would adding my codebase help when I literally was starting from scratch and that's why I needed the configuration file?