> where I feel so disconnected from my codebase I'd rather just delete it than continue.
If you allow your codebase to grow unfamiliar, even unrecognisable to you, that's on you, not the AI. Chasing some illusion of control via LLM output reproducibility won't fix the systemic problem of you integrating code that you do not understand.
It's not blame, it's useful feedback. For a large application you have to understand what different parts are doing and how everything is put together, otherwise no amount of tools will save you.
The process of writing the code, thinking all the while, is how most humans learn a codebase. Integrating alien code sequentially disrupts this process, even if you understand individual components.
The solution is to methodically work through the codebase, reading, writing, and internalizing its structure, and comparing that to the known requirements.
And yet, if this is always required of you as a professional, what value did the LLM add beyond speeding up your typing while delaying the required thinking?
If you allow your codebase to grow unfamiliar, even unrecognisable to you, that's on you, not the AI. Chasing some illusion of control via LLM output reproducibility won't fix the systemic problem of you integrating code that you do not understand.