I've been coding for about 10 years now and I usually pride myself on being able to handle whatever refactoring comes my way but man this current project is actually killing me. I've got this client in Chicago who needs me to migrate a massive chunk of legacy PHP over to a modern FastAPI backend and I've only got about three weeks left before their hard launch date. Usually I'd just grind it out but there are literally hundreds of endpoints that need basic boilerplate, validation logic, and unit tests. I've been copy-pasting back and forth from the ChatGPT web UI and it’s just not sustainable anymore. I'm losing my mind with the context window limits and having to constantly remind the model about the project structure every single time I open a new chat. I'm honestly starting to get pretty anxious about hitting the deadline because the manual overhead is just eating my days alive. I know the basics of using the API and I've messed around with a few VS Code extensions but everything feels so hit or miss lately.

Some of these tools just hallucinate the file paths or provide really shallow code that I have to spend twenty minutes fixing anyway which kind of defeats the point of automation. I need something that can actually handle batch processing or at least understand the codebase well enough to automate the repetitive stuff without me babysitting every single line. I'm looking for actual tools or maybe even just a specific workflow using the API that people are actually finding success with for heavy lifting like this. I've been looking at stuff like:

• Cursor for the IDE integration
• Aider for the terminal based stuff
• Custom scripts using the gpt-4-turbo API

Is it better to stick with something like Cursor or are there better command line tools that can pipe multiple files through a specific prompt set? I'm worried about some of these autonomous agents just blowing through my API credits and making a total mess of the git history while I'm not looking. My budget isn't huge but I can justify a few paid tools if they actually save me the 40+ hours of manual labor I'm looking at right now. What are you guys actually using when you have to automate like... hundreds of files worth of coding tasks using GPT? I really need to speed this up before I completely burn out on this project and miss the launch window...