When the ChatGPT fails to solve a bug for the FIFTIETH \*\*\*\*\*\*\* TIME, it’s tempting to fall back to “still doesn’t work, please fix.”

 DON’T DO THIS.

* It wastes time and money and
* It makes the AI **dumber.**

In fact, the graph above is what lazy prompting does to your AI.

It's a graph (from [this paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.01798)) of how GPT 3.5 performed on a test of common sense after an initial prompt and then after one or two lazy prompts (“recheck your work for errors.”).

Not only does the lazy prompt not help; **it makes the model worse**. And researchers found this across models and benchmarks.

Okay, so just shouting at the AI is useless. The answer isn't just 'try harder'—it's to apply effort strategically. You need to stop being a lazy prompter and start being a strategic debugger. This means giving the AI new information or, more importantly, a new process for thinking. Here are the two best ways to do that:

# Meta-prompting

Instead of telling the AI what to fix, you tell it how to think about the problem. You're essentially installing a new problem-solving process into its brain for a single turn.

Here’s how:

* **Define the thought process**—Give the AI a series of thinking steps that you want it to follow. 
* **Force hypotheses**—Ask the AI to generate multiple options for the cause of the bug before it generates code. This stops tunnel vision on a single bad answer.
* **Get the facts**—Tell the AI to summarize what we know and what it’s tried so far to solve the bug. Ensures the AI takes all relevant context into account.

# Ask another AI

Different AI models tend to [perform best for different kinds of bugs](https://arxiv.org/html/2506.03283v1). You can use this to your advantage by using a different AI model for debugging. Most of the vibe coding companies use Anthropic’s Claude, so your best bet is ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever models are currently at the top of [LM Arena](https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/webdev).

Here are a few tips for doing this well:

* **Provide context**—Get a summary of the bug from Claude. Just make sure to tell the new AI not to fully trust Claude. Otherwise, it may tunnel on the same failed solutions.
* **Get the files**—You need the new AI to have access to the code. Connect your project to Github for easy downloading. You may also want to ask Claude which files are relevant since ChatGPT has limits on how many files you can upload.
* **Encourage debate**—You can also pass responses back and forth between models to encourage debate. Research shows this works even with different instances of the same model.

# The workflow

As a bonus, here's the two-step workflow I use for bugs that just won't die. It's built on all these principles and has solved bugs that even my technical cofounder had difficulty with.

The [full prompts](https://gist.github.com/Kerry-vaughan/bed41bf50967a607c792f0297f023e5c) are too long for Reddit, so I put them on [**GitHub**](https://gist.github.com/Kerry-vaughan/bed41bf50967a607c792f0297f023e5c), but the basic workflow is:

**Step 1: The Debrief**. You have the first AI package up everything about the bug: what the app does, what broke, what you've tried, and which files are probably involved.

**Step 2: The Second Opinion**. You take that debrief and copy it to the bottom of the prompt below. Add that and the relevant code files to a different powerful AI (I like Gemini 2.5 Pro for this). You give it a master prompt that forces it to act like a senior debugging consultant. It has to ignore the first AI's conclusions, list the facts, generate a bunch of new hypotheses, and then propose a single, simple test for the most likely one.

I hope that helps. If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. I’ll try to help if I can. 

*P.S. This is the second in a series of articles I’m writing about how to vibe code effectively for non-coders. You can read the first article on debugging decay* [*here*](https://kerryvaughan.substack.com/p/debugging-decay-the-hidden-reason)*.*

*P.P.S. If you're someone who spends hours vibe coding and fighting with AI assistants, I want to talk to you! I'm not selling anything; just trying to learn from your experience. DM me if you're down to chat.*

Your lazy prompting is making ChatGPT dumber (and what to do about it)