I told myself it would be fine. I had been using AI coding assistants for suggestions and autocomplete for months — and it worked great. So when a new project came up with a tight deadline, I thought: why not let AI handle the whole backend? I set up a Cursor workspace, wrote a detailed spec, and hit generate. What followed was 5 days of "it compiles, but..." debugging that taught me more about software engineering than any tutorial ever did. What Went Surprisingly Well The boilerplate was genui