Or an absolute mentalist. I’ve used breadboards for 30 years and almost always spent more time debugging problems with the board than the circuits. Solder FTW.
IMHO, breadboards should come with warnings, to the effect of:
* Keep this thing pristine. Dust, corrosion, liquid, or any other indignity will invisibly poison the breadboard and take its toll on your sanity later.
* Use only DIP legs and 22-24 gauge wire. Shoving a TO220 into these spring clips will spread them and take its toll on your sanity later.
* Decouple, decouple, decouple. The distributed inductance of a breadboard is nontrivial and if you're not putting a nanofarad next to every logic chip, you will summon ghosts.
* Buying cheap breadboards with subpar contact plating will yield exactly the sort of performance you'd imagine. Breadboards are supposed to be an EASY way to build circuits, not a CHEAP way. You get what you pay for.
With all these things in mind, they're quite good at what they do.
Something I've learned is that modern CMOS logic is a lot more forgiving than TTL for breadboarding, thanks to low power consumption and push pull outputs. So if you're thinking of b'boarding a classic circuit like a minicomputer, allow yourself one concession to modernity, namely using something like 74HC logic instead of 74LS.
Solder can be awfully darn quick. More and more these days my "breadboarding" is between modules such as e.g., a microcontroller development board and one or more breakout boards. If I can't find a breakout board for a particular component, I'll make one using a proto board. So the actual quantity of wiring has gone down. I don't do things like wiring an entire address/data bus.
* Keep this thing pristine. Dust, corrosion, liquid, or any other indignity will invisibly poison the breadboard and take its toll on your sanity later.
* Use only DIP legs and 22-24 gauge wire. Shoving a TO220 into these spring clips will spread them and take its toll on your sanity later.
* Decouple, decouple, decouple. The distributed inductance of a breadboard is nontrivial and if you're not putting a nanofarad next to every logic chip, you will summon ghosts.
* Buying cheap breadboards with subpar contact plating will yield exactly the sort of performance you'd imagine. Breadboards are supposed to be an EASY way to build circuits, not a CHEAP way. You get what you pay for.
With all these things in mind, they're quite good at what they do.