Improve AI reliability for text reordering, formatting, and pattern matching

Apparently you can build an entire app with AI in a weekend. I must be doing it wrong. I’ve tried several of the AIs—ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Cursor, Claude. They seem to do a good job at first, some better than others. But the more I use them, the more they break down—especially on tasks I’d expect a computer to be good at: like reordering text or applying consistent formatting, pattern matching. Case in point: I asked one to reformat some legal docs for a website to match a format I’d already created. Instead, it rewrote the documents from scratch—hallucinating content, deleting the originals, and leaving me digging through git diffs to recover my work. I didn’t ask for rewrites. I just wanted layout changes. Surely it’s better with UI stuff, right? Everyone’s “vibe coding” with AI now. I gave it a shot. Looked okay at first—until I asked it to do the same thing twice. Different results. Wrong syntax. Buggy results. Wrong file types. No reusable components—just duplicated logic everywhere. So when you need to tweak something later? Hope you enjoy finding and changing it ten times. What about tests? Yes, it can write them. But do they actually test the right thing? Not usually. And worst of all? It usually slows me down. Some tools are worse than others—Co-Pilot, for example, constantly jumps in with the wrong suggestion and hijacks my editor like an over-eager intern with no context. Instead of speeding things up, I end up undoing, rewriting, or just wrestling with it to get out of my way. Productivity boost? More like productivity sink. I want to understand how people are actually building entire apps with AI and getting something functional and maintainable. Because so far, it just feels like smoke and mirrors. Would love to hear your comments👇