This has always caught up to me in a bad way.

All it takes is some brittleness to need to take apart the app code and understand it. AI fixes one thing, breaks something completely unrelated.

And usually it’s full of lots of spaghetti code slop. Then I need to find ways to modularize it, make it testable, and at least at some level clean it up.

This is why I say AI sw eng is basically just working with legacy code. It has always turned into unraveling and refactoring the ball of mud to be sane for me and agents to continue working with.

More and more though I just go slower. Write much of the code myself. And setup good validation for the specific parts I trust an agent to work autonomously. I try to expand the surface of things that can be done well autonomously without losing my own grip on the code.