Has anyone here ever been in a situation where they thought, "Wow, a unit test would have saved me" or "Man, thank god for our unit tests?" I don't think I've

Has anyone here ever been in a situation where they thought, "Wow, a unit test would have saved me" or "Man, thank god for our unit tests?" I don't think I've personally encountered that. Plenty of bugs at compile time or during regressions, but nothing where I could even imagine a unit test saving me. I think the true value of unit tests is documentation. Instead of writing documentation that says, "Hey, this function should do this", you're writing code to do that, which is usually a pretty good idea. Executable documentation is the way to go. It's a very lisp-y idea. That said, I'm not fond of the author's implication that unit testing will save you from cascading failures and make you a better programmer. He even says it's not a silver bullet, only to turn around and say it's the most magical thing to happen to software productivity since the invention of the keyboard. It seems to me that the productivity gains are from forcing your developers to actually understand the code they're writing and interfacing with, but personally, I don't think I'd trust or hire someone who wasn't proud enough of their work to do that on their own.