I've found that thinking and rationalizing about units and following TDD is much more important than a debugger. The debugger generally sucks because by the ti

I've found that thinking and rationalizing about units and following TDD is much more important than a debugger. The debugger generally sucks because by the time you have to use it the whole system isn't functioning properly. If you can just find out WHICH component broke you can rip out that component and build a test for it or expand upon an existing test. It usually turns out some input for a function broke the range and domain of the function and just adding another test for it and then fixing the tests fixes the problem. The additional benefit here is that not only do you not need to use the debugger but since its now a unit test and in your code you can't ever break that way again. A lot of people joke about how they don't write unit tests because they're trying to save time. In my experience, in any significantly complicated code base something massive will break and knowing exactly WHEN it broke and in what commit can dramatically lower the time needed to fix the problem.