This has become a personal debate for me recently, ever since I learned that there are several …
This has become a personal debate for me recently, ever since I learned that there are several software luminaries who eschew debuggers (the equivalent of taking an oscilliscope probe to a piece of electronics). I’ve always fallen on the side of debugging being about “isolate as narrowly as possible” and “don’t guess what’s happening when you can KNOW what’s happening”. The arguments against this approach is that speculation and statically analyzing a system reinforces that system in your mind and makes you more effective overall in the long run, even if it may take longer to isolate a single defect. I’ll stick with my debuggers, but I do agree that you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The modern extreme is asking Cursor’s AI agent “why is this broken?” I recently saw a relatively senior engineer joining a new company lean too heavily on Cursor to understand a company’s systems. They burned a lot of cycles getting poor answers. I think this is a far worse extreme.
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