Don’t feel too bad. There is a lot of negativity towards AI in the Ziggit community, but remember that is just a subset of the programming community as a whole.
AI is a tool, much like any other. It’s how you use it that matters.
For me, I don’t get much joy from building something from the from the ground up. I’d much rather polish a turd into an emerald than craft a diamond from scratch. I don’t care if people use AI or not, I care if the code is good, whether the project is cool (or practical) and whether or not the creator is motivated to continue.
Sometimes taking shortcuts for the sake of your sanity is the right call, and that has existed long before AI, as anyone who’s ever programmed at 5pm on a Friday, or had to sus out an outage during off hours will know.
I would say focus on the interfaces/architecture and the UI/customer facing code. Things like algorithms can be easy to swap out later, and if you profile the code, you may find that it’s not even worth optimizing in the first place because something unexpected is actually eating up all your runtime.
Anyways, I apologize if I’m being a bad influence on you, but with all the self deprecation, I just had to speak up.
FWIW, it looks like you’ve built something cool, and I think that’s something to be proud of