illustrator is saving the file under a new name everytime i hit 'save'

Hi, I don't think it's possible to override the default save feature, but you can certainly create a script to do this. I'm going to use JS since that's my go-to.

The method you're looking for is saveAs() in the Document object. It takes the full path & file name as its parameter.

activeDocument.saveAs( Folder.myDocuments + "/FileName___1.ai" )

 The other part of this algorithm is making that version number dynamic. Your exact methodology may differ, but I would check how many files with a similar name exist in the directory.

var len = Folder.myDocuments.getByName( "FileName___*.ai" ).length + 1 || 1
activeDocument.saveAs( Folder.myDocuments + "/FileName___" + len + ".ai" )

 The first line assigns the number to len, and the second line inserts len into the new file name we're saving.

I used the My Documents folder, but you can use any directory you want in its place.

len has a contingency with the or operator (||) but you may find you need to use a try-catch statement to avoid an error when no files get returned by getByName().