I kind of agree on the point about thinking of bugs at a different level. I'll first try to reason about what went wrong and look through the code based on the

I kind of agree on the point about thinking of bugs at a different level. I'll first try to reason about what went wrong and look through the code based on the stacktrace. But the debugger is nice for a certain set of problems. If you get a (java) lambda statement that is going fubar, it's nice to attach a debugger and just analyze the lambda flow to see how each statement effects the data. One of the projects that I worked on, we'd often repeat that we had to look for the _root_ causes of mistakes. Which is done without a debugger, it might just be a conceptual error. e.g: if we had a nullpointer, we could just add the simple null-check. But it'd be more interesting to reason about if it should even be possible for that variable to be _null_ anywhere in the code. So we could rewrite it in a way that it can't ever be null and avoid the check. Anyway, you probably should use a debugger , but it's just one tool of many.