Debugging with AI

Start by describing the bug clearly

A good bug report to an AI agent looks a lot like a good bug report to a person. The more precisely you describe the problem, the better the help you get back.

• What you expected: what the app should have done.
• What happened instead: the actual behavior, including any error message word for word.
• How to reproduce it: the exact steps that trigger the problem.

Vague reports like it does not work lead to guesswork. A clear report gives the agent enough to reason about the real cause instead of the first thing that looks suspicious.

Reproduce it in the live preview

Because mobileCoder builds and runs your app in the browser, you can reproduce a bug in the live preview while you work on it. Reproducing a problem reliably is often most of the battle. If you can make it happen on demand, you can tell when it stops happening.

Trigger the bug, note exactly what you did, then ask the agent to look into it. Keep the failing case in front of you so you have a concrete way to check whether a proposed fix worked.

Read the explanation, not just the fix

When the agent proposes a fix, ask it to explain what was wrong and why the change addresses it. The explanation is where you learn something, and it is also how you catch a fix that treats a symptom instead of the cause.

• Does the explanation match the behavior you actually saw?
• Does it explain the root cause, or just make the error message disappear?
• Could the same underlying problem show up somewhere else in the app?

AI-generated fixes can be wrong or incomplete. A fix that silences an error without addressing the cause often trades one bug for a harder one later.

Confirm the fix actually works

A fix is not done until you have seen the app behave correctly. Run the exact steps that used to trigger the bug and confirm the problem is gone.

• Repeat the original reproduction steps and check the result.
• Try nearby cases that could break in the same way, such as empty input or a different value.
• Make sure the fix did not break something that used to work, which is easy to miss.

If you cannot reproduce the bug anymore and related cases still behave, you have real evidence the fix worked, not just a hope that it did.

When you are stuck, narrow the problem

Some bugs resist the first few attempts. When that happens, make the problem smaller. Ask the agent to add logging so you can see what values the code is actually working with, or to isolate the failing piece so there is less to consider at once.

Change one thing at a time. If you and the agent change several things together and the bug goes away, you will not know which change fixed it, and the problem can quietly return. Small, deliberate steps are slower to feel but faster to finish.

Build habits that prevent bugs

The best debugging is the kind you never have to do. A few habits keep bugs from piling up in the first place, and they cost far less time than tracking down a problem after it hides.

• Test each feature right after the agent builds it, while you still remember what it should do.
• Keep changes small so that when something breaks, there is a short list of suspects.
• Read the code as you go rather than saving one big review for the end, so mistakes surface early.

None of this makes bugs impossible, and it should not. Debugging is a normal part of building software, not a sign you did something wrong. The goal is to find problems quickly and fix them with confidence, whether you wrote the code yourself or an agent did.

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