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AI Coding Tools Made Me Mass-Produce Bad Code Faster

Fazm Team··2 min read
ai-codingcode-qualitybugsdeveloper-experienceproductivity

AI Coding Tools Made Me Mass-Produce Bad Code Faster

The first month with AI coding tools felt like a superpower. I was shipping features three times faster. The second month, I started finding bugs that took twice as long to fix.

The problem is not that AI writes bad code. It is that AI writes plausible code. When you write a bug by hand, the code usually looks a bit off. Your mental model of the logic is visible in the structure and naming. When AI writes a bug, the code looks clean, well-structured, and completely wrong.

The Plausibility Trap

A function that sorts an array in the wrong order looks identical to one that sorts it correctly. The variable names make sense. The comments are accurate descriptions of what the code should do. But the comparison operator is flipped, or the edge case handling is missing, or the async flow has a subtle race condition.

You skim it, it looks right, you move on. The bug ships.

What Actually Helps

Slow down on review. This sounds obvious but it is genuinely hard when AI generates code fast enough that your review queue is always full. The speed of generation creates pressure to match the speed of review. Do not.

Write tests before generating code. Give the AI your test cases and let it generate implementations. If the tests pass, you have more confidence. If they do not, you caught the bug before it shipped.

Keep the AI's context small. The more files and context you dump into a prompt, the more likely the output contains subtle misunderstandings of your codebase. Focused, specific prompts produce more reliable code.

The Uncomfortable Truth

AI coding tools are productivity multipliers for experienced developers who know what correct code looks like. For everyone else, they are bug multipliers. The tool does not know the difference, and neither does the person using it.

Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.

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