[feoren]

The best debugger in the world would make me about 5% more efficient. That's about the percentage of my development time I spend going "WTF? Why is that happening?" That's the best possible improvement from the best possible debugger: about 5%.

The reason is that I almost always have a complete understanding of everything that is happening in all code that I write. Not because I have a mega-brain; only because "understanding everything that is happening all the time" becomes rather easy if all of your code is as simple as you can possibly make it, using clear interfaces, heavily leveraging the type system, keeping things immutable, dependency inversion, and aggressively attacking any unclear parts until you're satisfied with them. So debuggers are generally not involved. It's probably a couple times per week that I enter debug mode at all.

It sounds a little like saying "imagine the driving superpowers you could have if your car could perfectly avoid obstacles for you!" Okay, sure, that'd be life-saving sometimes, but the vast majority of the time, I'm not just randomly dodging obstacles. Planning ahead and paying attention kinda makes that moot.

[mewpmewp2]

Now imagine working on a 10+ years old codebase that 100s of developer hands have gone over. And several dependencies not being possible to even run locally because of being so out of date. Why work on that in the first place? Sometimes it pays really well.

[bluefirebrand]

I would absolutely not be comfortable trusting current AI to work on this sort of codebase and make meaningful improvements

[mewpmewp2]

Not AI, but we were talking about a debugger specifically.

[fenomas]

Please read things in context - my comment was about what people mean when they talk about a thing giving developers superpowers. I was not making a claim about how much you, personally, benefit from debuggers.

Also: I don't use debuggers much either. Is Superman's heat vision not a superpower because he rarely needs to melt things? :P

[adrianN]

It’s different if you work on a large legacy codebase where you have maybe a rough understanding of the high level architecture but nobody at the company has seen the code you’re working on in the last five years. There a debugger is often very helpful.

[anonzzzies]

That is your own code and only your libs then, no imports? Or you work in a language where imports are small (embedded?) so you know them all and maintain them all? Or maybe vanilla js/c without libs? Because import 1 npm and you have 100gb of crap deps you really don't understand which happens to work at moment t0 but at t1, when 1 npm updated, nothing works anymore and can't claim to understand it all as many/most people don't write 'simple code'.

[maxwellg]

You've never had to debug code that someone else wrote?

[feoren]

It's pretty uncommon. Most of my teammates' code is close to my standard -- I am referred to as the "technical lead" even though it's not an official title, but teammates do generally try to code to my standard, so it's pretty good code. If I'm doing a one-off bug fix or trying to understand what the code does, usually reading it is sufficient. If I'm taking some level of shared ownership of the code, I'm hopefully talking a lot with the person who wrote it. I'm very choosy about open-source libraries so it's rare that I need to dig into that code at all. I don't use any ecosystems like React that tempt you to just pull in random half-baked components for everything.

The conflux of events requiring me to debug someone else's code would be someone who wrote bad code without much oversight, then left the company, and there's no budget to fix their work properly. Not very common. Since I usually know what the code is supposed to be doing, such code can likely be rewritten properly in a small fraction of the original time.