This post hits harder than most “AI coding” discussions because it shows the part people usually hide: recovery.
A lot of developers are treating AI like an architect when it’s really just a very confident assistant. The scary part is that AI-generated code often looks correct even when it completely breaks system constraints underneath.
The biggest takeaway for me wasn’t “frameworks are bad” — it was that deep system understanding matters more than tooling. Whether you use Laravel, raw PHP, Node, or Go, if you don’t understand transaction flow, auth lifecycle, concurrency, and rollback strategy, eventually something will break in production and AI won’t save you.
Also:
“Build the engine first. Paint the car later.”
That’s genuinely one of the best pieces of advice for beginner devs building large systems.
Respect for being transparent about the Git mistake too. Almost every serious developer has a painful “I should’ve committed that” moment at some point 😭
The rebuild probably taught you more about backend engineering than 20 tutorials combined.