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I came across this post on Reddit, and I can understand why the buyer is asking for advice.

According to his post, he gave the freelancer clear instructions from the beginning. At one point, the freelancer said he couldn't properly test the software because he didn't have the same display. The buyer didn't start arguing about it. He bought the display himself, paid another £20 for shipping and sent everything over. That tells me he genuinely wanted the project to succeed. The buyer also isn't accusing the freelancer of being lazy or trying to scam him. He actually says he believes the freelancer is a genuinely nice person who has put a lot of effort into the project. His conclusion is simply 

that the work may be beyond the freelancer's abilities.

 I think that is an important distinction. There is a big difference between someone who doesn't want to do the work and someone who accepted a project he wasn't capable of finishing. The buyer says he has received about five revisions and none of them work. The original delivery time was 20 days, and the project has now been going on for more than 50 days. Even if you subtract the time needed to ship the hardware, that is still a long time without a working result.

Then there was this ….. The buyer explains that he copied the freelancer's code into Claude several times and managed to fix problems the freelancer couldn't solve himself. 

Once a buyer starts debugging the freelancer's work with AI, something has gone wrong.

 Buyers don't hire programmers because they need someone who can generate code anymore. Claude and ChatGPT can already do that. 

They hire someone because they expect experience, debugging skills and a working solution. 

This shows why accepting every project isn't always a good idea. Some projects look fairly straightforward until you actually start working on them. If you eventually realise you're out of your depth, sending revision after revision usually doesn't solve anything. It costs time, frustrates the buyer and often leads to the same outcome and ends with a cancellation anyway.

Based only on what the buyer shared, I would probably ask for a refund as well. Not because I believe the freelancer didn't try, but because the agreed result still hasn't been delivered after almost two months. Some people believe AI has made programming easier. In some cases, it has done the opposite. Buyers can already generate code themselves. The value of an experienced programmer is no longer writing code. 

The value is understanding why the code doesn't work, finding the real problem and delivering something that works reliably. That is what buyers are paying for.

A good programmer writes code, and a great one solves problems.

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