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 genuinely impressive. In about 2 hours, I had:
A fully typed Express.js API with 12 endpoints
