AI wrote 80% of my plugin. Six months later I couldn't maintain it.

The first thing I noticed when I reopened that plugin after six months was that the same date-formatting logic lived in three places.

One in a utility function, one in a class method, one inline in a template. All slightly different. The bug someone reported, a display that was occasionally off, came from the oldest of the three. Fixing it meant first figuring out which copy to touch, and whether the other two needed touching too. The bug wasn't hard. Reading the shape of my own code was. I'd let AI write about 80% of it, fast, and I never wrote a spec.

I build WordPress plugins and use coding agents most days, so I'm not here to tell anyone to stop using them. This is about keeping the speed and still being able to maintain what comes out of it. Below is what I changed, ordered by how much it actually helped. The top two alone make future-me a lot less miserable.

The setup, for context

Versions move fast, so treat the names below as "true when I checked, verify on your machine."