I Let AI Write My Code. It Led to a Two-Day Nightmare.

Hey everyone,

Like many of you, I can’t imagine my software engineering job without tools like ChatGPT. They’re incredible for boilerplate, debugging snippets, and even generating complex logic. I’ve come to rely on them.

But recently, I learned a hard lesson. A really hard one.

The Honeymoon Phase
A few months ago, I had to perform a complex data transformation. It required a recursive function that was a bit of a headache to think through. So, I turned to my trusty assistant, ChatGPT-4o. It spit out a huge function. I ran some test cases, it worked. I pushed it to staging, it worked. I went live. Everything was fine.

My mistake? I didn’t check the code line by line. It was massive, and hey, if it works, don’t touch it, right? 😅

The Downward Spiral
Fast forward to last week. I had a similar task: exporting a huge, nested dataset to a specific Excel format. I used the same technique. This time, 4o wasn’t giving me the right output.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just switch to a different model. I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro, and it worked instantly! Or so I thought. It passed most of my test cases, so I moved it to staging.

This is where it all fell apart.

I made the same mistake—I didn’t read the code. A critical bug burst onto the scene. But this time, I couldn’t just patch it. The function was a recursive black box. I didn’t write it, so I had no idea how it worked. I couldn’t fix what I didn’t understand.

I tried another AI to fix the AI-generated code. It seemed to work like magic at first, but I quickly realized it was also faulty, just in a different, more subtle way.

The “Prompt Devil”
For two straight days, I became a “prompt devil.” I was locked in a battle with the AI, trying every prompt engineering trick I could think of to fix the function. I tweaked, I rephrased, I begged. None of it worked. The AI couldn’t fix the mess it had created because it lacked a true understanding of the core problem.

The Realization
Finally, I gave up on the AI.

I took a step back, sat down for an hour, and just thought. I mapped out the logic on my own. I wrote my own recursive approach from scratch.

And it worked. Perfectly. For all levels of nested complexity. It was clean, understandable, and most importantly, I knew exactly how it worked.

Final Learning: The Ultimate Weapon
My experience taught me a crucial lesson, one that’s easy to forget when you have a powerful AI at your fingertips.

Your ultimate weapon should be your brain. GPT is your helper only.

AI is a phenomenal assistant, a copilot. It can handle the repetitive stuff, offer suggestions, and help you learn. But for complex, critical logic, you cannot afford to outsource your understanding. The moment you ship code you don’t understand is the moment you plant a time bomb in your codebase.

Use AI. Leverage it. But never, ever let it replace your own critical thinking.

Has anyone else been burned by this? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.