AI Made Coding Faster. So Why Am I Spending More Time Debugging?

Here's something I've noticed since I started using AI more seriously for development:

I'm writing code faster than ever.

But sometimes...

I'm also debugging for longer.

And I don't think that's a contradiction.

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The numbers changed

Before AI, a task might look like this:

30 min → writing
10 min → debugging

Now it can look more like:

5 min  → writing
45 min → debugging

The code appeared almost instantly.

The problem was understanding whether the code was actually right.

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AI is really good at producing plausible code

That's the part I think we sometimes underestimate.

AI doesn't usually give you obviously broken code.

It gives you code that looks reasonable.

Something like:

const getUser = async () => {
  const response = await fetch("/api/user");

  return response.json();
};

Looks fine.

And maybe it is fine.

But what happens when:

• the server returns 401?
• the response isn't valid JSON?
• the request fails?
• the API changes?
• the user doesn't exist?

The code isn't necessarily wrong.

It's just incomplete.

And that's where the debugging starts.

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The bottleneck moved

Before AI, a lot of development time was spent answering:

"How do I write this?"

Now AI can often answer that question in seconds.

The new question is:

"Is this actually the right thing to write?"

That's a very different problem.

And you can't solve it by generating more code.

You need context.

You need to understand the application.

You need to understand the framework.

You need to understand the trade-offs.

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This is especially obvious with frontend code

Ask an AI to optimize a React component and it might introduce:

• unnecessary memoization
• complicated state management
• extra abstractions
• effects that weren't needed
• dependencies you don't actually understand

Everything can still compile.

The app can still work.

The code can even look more professional.

But now you've inherited a problem you didn't create yourself:

you have to debug code you didn't fully understand in the first place.

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And there's another problem: AI can make you overconfident

This is probably the bigger issue.

When you spend an hour debugging your own code, you usually have some idea of what you were trying to do.

When AI generates 200 lines of code in a few seconds, it's easy to assume:

"It probably knows what it's doing."

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn't.

And the more impressive the output looks, the easier it is to forget that looking correct and being correct are two different things.

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So should we stop using AI?

Absolutely not.

I don't want to go back to writing every piece of boilerplate manually just to prove that I can.

AI is incredibly useful.

I use it for things like:

• exploring unfamiliar APIs
• generating boilerplate
• explaining errors
• brainstorming implementations
• refactoring repetitive code
• writing tests
• getting a second opinion

But there's a difference between using AI to accelerate development and outsourcing your understanding to AI.

That distinction matters.

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Maybe the real skill is changing

Knowing how to write code is still important.

But knowing how to read, question, debug, and validate generated code is becoming just as important.

AI can generate five solutions.

You still need to decide which one belongs in your codebase.

AI can write a test.

You still need to ask whether the test actually proves anything.

AI can fix an error.

You still need to understand why the error happened.

That's engineering.

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The weird part?

AI didn't necessarily make debugging less important.

It might have made understanding code more important than ever.

The faster we can generate code, the more code we can potentially generate without thinking.

And that's where things get interesting.

Because the bottleneck isn't always:

"How fast can I write code?"

Sometimes it's:

"How fast can I understand what I just built?"

And I'm starting to think that's going to be one of the most important developer skills in the AI era.

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Has AI actually made you faster overall, or have you just moved the time from writing code to debugging it?