I am an AI-holic. You know that guy who once in a while has a lot of fun drinking, has a huge hangover the next day, and swears "never again"? I am sort of that guy, but with AI.

Going all-in on AI, burning out on it, and promising "never again."

Last week, I started ramping up my AI usage, thinking, It’s not bad, it’s quite useful. It’s not annoying anymore—maybe it improved. I played around with local LLMs, and they can do stuff; it's not bad. Some rough edges, but it’s salvagable. I thought maybe I was getting better intuition, or maybe AI was just getting better. Yesterday, I decided to give AI a task: rewrite my build scripts. Over ten years, I’ve been maintaining my own set of build scripts just to make my life less miserable in the big AAA machine with its AAA setup. I never intended to share those scripts, so they were sloppy, ugly, and required nonstop maintenance and tweaking. So, I composed the prompt and let an agentic AI—let's give some specificity: Sonnet 5 under a Copilot harness—refactor my scripts and make them ergonomic and beautiful.

It did the job very well. It actually did it too well, except for one small footgun. That was two days ago. I was enjoying the scripts for one day, and today everything fell apart. You know, a day passes, and I thought I had introduced some regression or oversaw something in the past. I bisected the game code with git, went back two months, and everything was broken.

I am in AI euphoria. I asked the AI to figure out what was going on, and for the whole day, we were chasing ghosts. You know what happened? I have `rsync`. There is a switch: `--cvs-exclude`. I’ve had those scripts for ten years; that switch is old, and I barely remember what it does, but it excludes a lot of heavy binaries. However, in our codebase, some binaries are included in the repository and are important, so I had to explicitly include one folder called `core` in the `rsync` arguments.

Without that explicit inclusion, a handful of files weren't syncing with the build machine, failing the build. But our build scripts aren't perfect either, so things only fell apart on a completely clean build. You wouldn't hit it just cleaning in Visual Studio—you had to manually delete files first, and only then would the build break. Which is exactly why everything was working fine yesterday.

AI isn't there yet. The idea of rewriting software from scratch might sound great, but prepare to painfully rediscover a lot of tribal knowledge—like that little switch that just wasted a whole day of useful development.

Never again, AI. Until tomorrow... AI?