I'm a self taught programmer too, but I've also worked professionally for a while now. What saved my ass was a good IDE and GUI. I prefer Jetbrains, which has

I'm a self taught programmer too, but I've also worked professionally for a while now. What saved my ass was a good IDE and GUI. I prefer Jetbrains, which has autosaves, local undo/redo and backups, AND visual git and diffing all built-in. I use git thirty times a day. But the git command line? Maybe 3 or 4 times a year. The IDE is that good. They're usually free for personal / noncommercial projects and very affordable for individual licenses for commercial stuff too. If you prefer VScode, the Gitlens extension is similar. Gitkraken is another standalone good one. The git CLI was made by the Linux dude. Much respect, of course, but it was a tool not meant for mere mortals. Its syntax is incredibly unintuitive and error prone and I try to avoid it as much as possible. A good git GUI abstracts that and makes the everyday stuff a lot more bearable. A good visual 3-way diffing will make merge conflicts a hundred times easier to resolve. The one in Jetbrains is really good. Then to make life even easier, you don't need AI for that, you need good collaboration practices (small, limited PRs, good commit messages explaining the what, good in-code comments explaining the why). Natural language search would be great. You can already integrate LLMs into the IDE and ask it questions, so I guess that's one step.