This was my exact first experience trying to build anything of significant size.

Several projects later, I can work with the AI now to produce several thousand lines of code, I understand it, it is what I asked for, has the architecture I wanted, is not bloated and is not buggy.

Spend time planning, figuring out the architecture you want, refining, breaking things down into smaller implementable features with implementation plans for each feature. Review these things aggressively. Make sure they align with your expectations.

Then get it to start writing code. Writing tests for everything. Include detailed runtime logging. Read what it produces, understand it and redo it if it wasn't what you expected. Your experience will be vastly superior to that first attempt.