Production Debugging for AI-Generated Code: What You Need to Know

AI coding assistants like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Replit Agent, Lovable, and Bolt have changed how we ship code. You can build features in hours that used to take days. But when that AI-generated code breaks in production, debugging becomes a different challenge.

Here’s what’s different about debugging AI-written code, and how to approach it with the right tools.

The AI Code Reality

A 2025 Stack Overflow survey found that 78% of developers now use AI coding assistants. That’s a massive shift in how production code gets written.

What this means:

• You’re running code you didn’t write line by line
• You might not fully understand every implementation detail
• Traditional “just remember what you were thinking” debugging doesn’t work
• You need observability, not just logs

The Problem With AI-Generated Code in Production

AI assistants are incredible at generating working code fast. They’re less good at:

1. Edge case handling: AI trains on common patterns, not your specific edge cases
2. Context awareness: It doesn’t know your full system architecture
3. Performance considerations: It optimizes for “working” not “optimal”
4. Error handling: Often generates happy-path code without robust error handling

When something breaks, you can’t just “remember” the logic because you didn’t write it from scratch. You need to understand what’s actually happening at runtime.

Traditional Debugging Doesn’t Scale

Here’s the old debugging workflow when something breaks:

1. User reports a bug
2. You try to reproduce it locally
3. You can’t reproduce it (different data, different environment)
4. You add console.log() or print() statements
5. You redeploy
6. You wait for the bug to happen again
7. You realize you logged the wrong variable
8. Repeat steps 4-7

This workflow is painful for any code. It’s worse for AI-generated code because:

• You’re less familiar with the implementation
• You don’t know what to log
• You’re debugging by trial and error

What You Actually Need

To debug AI-generated code in production effectively, you need three things:

1. Live Variable Inspection

You need to see the exact state of variables when the bug occurs. Not what you think they should be. Not what they were in development. What they actually are in production.

Traditional approach: Add logging, redeploy, wait, repeat

Better approach: Set a live breakpoint and capture variable state without redeploying

With Tracekit, you can:

• Select a file and line number in the dashboard
• Define what variables to capture
• See the captured state next time that code runs
• Remove the breakpoint when done

No code changes. No redeployment. Just data.

2. Distributed Tracing

AI-generated code often involves multiple services, databases, and APIs. When something breaks, you need to understand the full request lifecycle.

What distributed tracing shows:

• Which service is slow or failing
• Where errors originate
• How requests flow through your system
• Latency breakdown by component

OpenTelemetry is the industry standard for this. Tracekit uses it for automatic instrumentation across Node.js, PHP, Python, Go, and more.

3. Historical Context

When debugging AI code, you need to answer: “Has this always behaved this way, or did something change?”

Critical questions:

• Did this break after a deployment?
• Is this specific to certain users or inputs?
• Has latency been increasing over time?
• Are errors correlated with other events?

You need retention and query capabilities to answer these questions.

Practical Example: Debugging a Cursor-Generated API

Let’s say Cursor generated this Node.js Express endpoint for you:

app.post('/api/orders', async (req, res) => {
  const { userId, items, paymentMethod } = req.body;
  
  // Calculate total
  const total = items.reduce((sum, item) => sum + item.price * item.quantity, 0);
  
  // Process payment
  const payment = await stripe.charges.create({
    amount: total * 100,
    currency: 'usd',
    customer: paymentMethod,
  });
  
  // Create order
  const order = await db.orders.create({
    userId,
    items,
    total,
    paymentId: payment.id,
  });
  
  res.json({ success: true, orderId: order.id });
});

Looks reasonable. Ships to production. Then you start seeing intermittent payment failures.

Traditional Debugging (Slow)

1. Add logs around payment processing
2. Redeploy
3. Wait for failure
4. Realize you need more context
5. Add more logs
6. Redeploy again
7. Wait more

Time to resolution: Hours to days

With Observability (Fast)

1. Check distributed traces: See the full request flow
2. Spot that paymentMethod is sometimes undefined
3. Set live breakpoint to capture req.body when error occurs
4. See that frontend sometimes sends paymentMethodId instead of paymentMethod
5. Fix the parameter inconsistency
6. Deploy fix

Time to resolution: Minutes to hours

Tool Recommendations by Stage

Early Stage (Side Projects, <1000 Users)

Budget: $0-50/month

Stack:

• Tracekit Free (200k traces/month)
• Basic error tracking (Sentry free tier)
• Application logs (stdout + log viewer)

Why: Get visibility without costs eating into early revenue.

Growing (Paying Customers, 1k-10k Users)

Budget: $50-200/month

Stack:

• Tracekit Starter or Growth ($29-99/month)
• Error tracking with context
• Performance monitoring
• Retention for trend analysis

Why: You need to debug quickly to keep customers happy, but can’t justify enterprise pricing.

Scaling (10k+ Users, Multiple Services)

Budget: $200-500/month

Stack:

• Tracekit Pro ($299/month)
• Advanced query capabilities
• Long retention (180 days)
• Multi-service tracing
• Custom integrations

Why: High traffic and multiple services need robust observability, but $2000/month for Datadog still doesn’t make sense.

Best Practices for AI-Generated Code

Based on experience debugging production systems with heavy AI-generated code:

1. Instrument Everything

Don’t wait for problems. Add observability from day one.

For Express.js:

const { TracekitNodeSDK } = require('@tracekit/node-apm');

TracekitNodeSDK.init({
  serviceName: 'my-api',
  apiKey: process.env.TRACEKIT_API_KEY,
});

That’s it. Automatic instrumentation for HTTP, database, and external calls.

2. Review AI Code Before Production

AI is a tool, not a replacement for code review. Before shipping:

• Check error handling
• Verify input validation
• Test edge cases
• Confirm security practices

3. Set Up Alerts

Don’t wait for users to report bugs. Monitor:

• Error rates by endpoint
• Latency percentiles (p50, p95, p99)
• Unusual traffic patterns
• Failed dependencies

Tracekit includes AI-powered anomaly detection that learns normal behavior and alerts on deviations.

4. Keep Production Logs Clean

AI-generated code often includes debug prints. Remove them before production or you’ll drown in noise.

Bad:

console.log('Processing order...');
console.log('User:', userId);
console.log('Items:', items);

Good:
Use structured logging with appropriate levels:

logger.info('Processing order', { userId, itemCount: items.length });

5. Document AI-Generated Logic

Add comments explaining what the AI code does, especially for complex algorithms:

// AI-generated sorting algorithm
// Sorts items by priority (1-3) then by timestamp
// Returns array of items ready for processing
function sortOrderItems(items) {
  // ...AI-generated implementation
}

Future you (or your team) will thank you.

When to Call in Humans

AI is powerful, but some production issues need human expertise:

Escalate when:

• The same bug recurs after “fixes”
• Performance degrades over time with no code changes
• Security vulnerabilities are suspected
• Data consistency issues appear
• The system behaves in truly unexpected ways

Don’t spend 4 hours debugging when a 30-minute consultation with an expert would solve it.

Getting Started

If you’re shipping AI-generated code to production (and most of us are now), here’s your minimal viable observability setup:

1. Install an APM SDK – Tracekit setup takes ~5 minutes
2. Enable distributed tracing – Automatic with OpenTelemetry
3. Set up basic alerts – Start with error rate and latency
4. Test the live breakpoint – Set one on a test endpoint to confirm it works
5. Ship with confidence – You now have visibility when things break

The AI coding revolution is here. The observability revolution needs to keep up.

Try Tracekit free: tracekit.dev/register