Why I Stopped Asking Chinese AI for Help with Code Bugs
When I first started using OpenClaw and Hermes Agent for coding, every bug sent me straight to a search engine. I'd paste the error message into whatever Chinese AI model was available at the time. The answers came back fast. They sounded confident. They were almost always wrong.
Not wrong in an obvious way — wrong in the way that wastes hours. A function name that doesn't exist in my version. A config change that breaks something else. A "solution" that fixes the symptom but leaves the root cause untouched. And when I pasted the error back, the AI would just suggest something else. The suggestions piled up. The bug stayed.
This happened enough times that I started to notice a pattern. The Chinese AI models would give me one fix per prompt. No explanation of why. No walkthrough of what the fix actually changed. No guidance on what to check if it didn't work. Just one answer, delivered with total confidence, completely untraceable.
Then I tried Claude for debugging.
The first difference I noticed: Claude explains its reasoning. It doesn't just say "change line 42 to X." It says "line 42 throws this error because of Y. Changing it to X fixes Y. If that doesn't work, check Z." That last sentence saved me more time than the fix itself.
The second difference: when Claude is wrong, I can trace where it went wrong. The reasoning chain is visible. I can say "you assumed A, but A is false because of B." The Chinese AI models didn't give me a chain to trace. They gave me a conclusion and a period.
Chinese AI has improved a lot since then. Several model generations later, the answers are much better than they were. But that early experience taught me something I still apply: the best AI tool is not the most confident one. It's the one that explains its reasoning. If I can't follow how an AI got from my question to its answer, I don't trust the answer.
These days I use Claude for code review and debugging. Hermes Agent handles the actual coding. ChatGPT does writing and quick research. Phind is my search engine. Every tool in my stack has one thing in common: I can tell when it's wrong, because I can see how it got there.
