[meltedcapacitor]

You probably were not born last time I fired a debugger.

Those who can't code, debug. :-)

Joke apart it's a style thing, tracing and thinking gets you a long way, though virtuoso debugger users can be productive too no doubt. It's a bit like GUI vs CLI.

[qsort]

In principle, yes, thinking is strictly better than simulating, and over-relying on a debugger can get you into the habit of not reasoning about your code.

In practice, most software is a stack of abstractions and bugs can be caused by anything at any level of that pile, including libraries. The ability to quickly inspect the state at a given execution step is not a tool that can realistically be dispensed by just thinking hard about the code.

[ehnto]

I wrote without a debugger for most of the start of my career, but problem solving is about having the right information on hand, and for me a debugger lets me gather that information quicker, and it also lets me iterate faster.

There's another great benefit to a debugger, and that is troubleshooting long-running code or hard to prime iterations. Like for example, debugging a checkout flow can be very cumbersome as you have to prime the state for every test. There are plenty of workarounds if you have to log your way through it, but wouldn't it just be easier to use a tool designed for the job?

[lukas099]

You are thinking while you debug. It just gives you more to think about.