AI Built My UI in 2 Hours. Then I Spent 3 Weeks Fixing It.

The PR had 47 changed files. Three new React components, two API routes, a context provider, and what appeared to be an entire form validation library. All generated in under two hours by an AI agent following a prompt I wrote while eating lunch.

"This is incredible," I thought. "This would have taken a week."

Six weeks later, I'm still untangling that PR. The components work — mostly. The forms validate — sort of. But nobody on my team can explain why the state is being lifted to a context provider when a simple prop would suffice. The AI didn't know our existing patterns, so it invented new ones. And now we have two patterns doing the same job, and zero documentation explaining which to use when.

This is the Ghost Implementation problem — code with all the bones (components, functions, imports) and none of the meat (justified logic that explains why those bones are arranged that way).

The Ghost Implementation Problem