It happens, but when it does, you need to ask yourself: if the agent is struggling this much to produce something that's working, am I taking the right approach

It happens, but when it does, you need to ask yourself: if the agent is struggling this much to produce something that's working, am I taking the right approach? If you ask for a particular thing, they'll do it, even if it's not a good idea. When you start running into issues, they'll try to solve those issues for you. They'll do that as long as you keep asking, even if there's no good way to properly fix the issues, because the initial approach was wrong. When an agent is struggling to produce something, I switch to asking it to re-evaluate the approach itself, and ask it to suggest a less brittle approach. I then chat through the various options, and choose the best approach that makes sense, and then the agent is back on track, producing properly working code without the issues. Some people just keep pushing through on bad approaches, without questioning it and then blame the agent for being unable to finish it.