When did using an AI coding assistant stop saving you time and actually start wasting it?
I’ve been relying on AI coding tools a lot more over the last few weeks to speed up my workflow.
At first, it feels like a total cheat code. You hit autocomplete, or drop a quick prompt, and boom syntax errors vanish and boilerplate logic is done in seconds
But lately, I’ve hit a wall.
The moment a bug involves a deep state-management issue, multi-file dependencies, or some weird framework edge case, things go sideways fast. The AI starts giving confident answers that turn out to be completely wrong. Before you know it, you’ve spent 45 minutes tweaking prompts and reading broken generated code—something that a standard console.log or breakpoint would’ve caught in 5 minutes 😅
It made me realize there’s a sneaky tipping point where "vibe debugging" stops being a productivity boost and turns into an endless rabbit hole.
For everyone using tools like Cursor, Copilot, or Claude daily:
Where do you personally draw the line? How many failed prompts do you give the AI before you say "forget it" and open DevTools to debug it manually?
Replies
I don't think I'll be able to do development and debugging manually anymore. I feel like I've already become a slave to AI :)
These days my standard setup is combining multiple AI agents, each with its own role.
I brainstorm and pressure-test ideas with Claude.ai first, then hand the result to Claude Code, which acts as the orchestrator.
Claude Code assigns the actual implementation to Codex as the worker.
The Luna model on Codex is cost-efficient, so the Plus plan is more than enough.
Splitting thinking, coordinating, and coding across different agents has cut down a lot of the "confidently wrong" loops for me.
An assistant wrote a clean fix and a passing test. I reverted the fix to verify, and the test still passed because the assertion was never testing the actual bug. Now I lose more time proving the agent's tests can fail than I would writing the logic myself.
Toone
Yes and no, I stop after the second confident fix if I cannot explain why it should work, then go back to the smallest reproduction. Prompting harder has cost me more than a breakpoint 😅
Bob's CLI
An example of time wasted....thanks githubCopilot...What's the point of having this in my repo if it doesn't even know basic stuff... :/