I spent a week trying to make AI-assisted development less chaotic.

Hi, I’m David. I’m close enough to middle age that I have no interest in pretending I discovered the future of software development in a week. What I did do was spend one serious week building a small local app with AI assistance, while trying to keep the project understandable. That turned out to be harder, and more interesting, than I expected. The coding agent could move quickly. Sometimes very quickly. It could generate code, refactor, write boilerplate, and help move the project forward. But it could also widen scope, preserve the wrong assumption, “helpfully” redesign something I wanted to keep boring, or act on context that was never meant to become implementation work. The main lesson I took from that week was simple: AI-assisted development is not only a coding problem. It is a context management problem. So I started using a lightweight loop: Task Brief -> think through the problem Codex Contract -> give the coding agent a bounded instruction set Final Review -> test, inspect, patch, and update project memory The result was not perfect AI coding. The result was reviewable AI coding. That distinction felt important enough to write down. The three articles I published three companion articles from that first week. They are meant to stand on their own, but together they describe the workflow, the memory system, and the objections I think are worth taking seriously. 1. Vibe Coding Done Right This is the accessible starting point. It explains how I used a lightweight, spec-driven workflow as a solo developer working with ChatGPT, Codex, VS Code, PowerShell, and a local LLM through LM Studio. The point is not the exact stack. The point is the separation: one place for thinking, learning, and review; another place for bounded implementation; documentation as the memory that keeps the next task grounded. 2. Documentation as Project Memory in AI-Assisted Development This is the more technical case-study piece. The part that surprised me most was documentation. Not