# Breaking Free from AI Bugfixing Doom Loops Sometimes the most frustrating bugs are like a piece of paper stuck to your shoe - obvious once you look down, but invisible while you're walking around in circles. Here's a story about getting stuck in an AI bugfixing loop and how to escape it. Picture this: Twenty hours of development time lost chasing what seemed like a complex bug. The reality? A hardcoded placeholder URL sitting in plain sight. The AI assistant, despite being asked fifty different ways, never spotted this obvious issue. It's like having a conversation with someone who keeps missing the elephant in the room. The breakthrough came from a simple compiler error report. Running 'npx tsc --noEmit' surfaced a type error in middleware.ts. The AI's response finally included the problematic code snippet, revealing the hardcoded '.yourdomain.com' that had been causing all the trouble. Here's what matters: AI coding tools are like sophisticated metal detectors. They're great at finding certain types of problems, but sometimes they need you to point them in the right direction. Well-specified prompts can generate hundreds of lines of useful code, but they can also miss the obvious if we don't frame our questions correctly. The right prompts and working process with AI elicits valuable information from deep within the knowledge base the AI is trained on. But sometimes you need to step back and look at the basics - like actually reading the error-causing file yourself. With the right approach, the AI will bring forward information that was obscure in your field. The key is building better prompts that force the AI to thoroughly examine the codebase and documentation before suggesting solutions. Here's a practical tip: Next time you're stuck in a bugfixing loop, check out the Virten Prompt Library demo at https://demovpl.virten.app. Next time you are working with an AI in any capacity, work normally, only before you send each prompt to the AI, take a look at the prompts available in the demovpl. Using this pattern you will be able to easily see how the VPL can help you with what you're already doing with the AI.