The distinction I wish someone had told me sooner: "the error is gone" and "the bug is fixed" are not the same claim

Noticed this pattern across a few AI-assisted debugging sessions before I really knew how to describe it. A fix comes back, the error stops appearing, and I start treating the problem as solved. Those are two different things, and that gap is where a few of my worse debugging sessions actually started.

When an error disappears, all you really know is the symptom stopped showing up. A retry around a failing call can make an intermittent error go quiet without fixing whatever caused the intermittency. A broader try/catch can stop an exception from surfacing without touching the state that caused it. Both answer the easy question, does the error go away? Neither answers the one that matters, did this fix the actual cause, and what else did it change along the way?

That second question is easy to skip, mostly because the first one already feels like progress.

What's helped: describing the actual failure and a suspected cause before asking for a fix, asking for a few possible explanations instead of the first plausible one, and once a fix exists, checking what it changes beyond making the error disappear. A regression test built around the original failure, not the current error message, is usually the honest check.

It's basically the same discipline as a decent code review, not just "does the diff compile" but "does this actually solve what it claims to." That scrutiny is easy to forget when the fix came from a chat window instead of a person, even though the risk of accepting something plausible-but-wrong is the same either way.

Went deeper into a specific case that made this click for me here: https://medium.com/@nagatomopedro05/why-your-ai-debugging-sessions-keep-going-in-circles-e645c35479c6

Where do you draw the line between generating a fix and actually validating it, especially reviewing a PR where you suspect AI was involved?