[breatheoften]

I’m trying to think through why removing the debugger should help one build a mental model of the code faster than having constant access to one.

I guess I can imagine workflows that are overly debugger dependent - the programmer has a “trust nothing” mentality and checks the behavior of the code against their mental model of the code “too much” thus slowing them down.

But I think theres reason to think the programmer can maintain a mental model of the program while using debugger queries to verify aspects of that model in a way that’s a lot more efficient than relying on mental model alone. Beyond that at some point observation of the behavior of the program will come into play — and I don’t see why utilizing the power of a debugger to generate a lot of precise observations quickly isn’t a pure win ...

[hzhou321]

Seems that you are agreeing with imagining and use debugger to verify is a lot more efficient. And for verification, print is more direct than orchestrating the breakpoints and then print with debugger's syntax (or gui navigation).