Are vibration encoding devices really saves time when the debugging is taken into account?

Not looking to stir up trouble here, but genuinely asking. The first version of my app was mostly put together with prompts, and it took about four hours to have a functional demo. Then came three weeks of fixing bugs that the prompt-based approach caused, like data type mismatches, weird behavior when form fields were empty, etc.

I suppose adding up total time spent, it may not have been quicker than if I had written the whole thing from scratch, though it certainly felt quick at the time because early success was very tangible.

So for those of you who have actually shipped products like this, has the ratio of time building vs. time debugging gotten any better as the tools matured, or is that part of the deal permanently stuck with us?