I've read that story several times. It's never sat well with me, and it's only now that I have a concise argument against it: Pike is conflating the diagnosis

I've read that story several times. It's never sat well with me, and it's only now that I have a concise argument against it: Pike is conflating the diagnosis process with the quality of the chosen solution. In practice, they are often unrelated. A good debugging tool will not only show you the state of the system when the bug happens, but help you understand the execution path that formed that state. (If your debugger doesn't do that for you, then you should either get better at using it, or find a better debugger.) A debugger _doesn't_ tell you how a problem should be solved; that's a separate decision which often has many other factors beyond "improve the design to be more future-proof". The story also implies that it should be enough for the programmer to explore the mental model they currently have. But if I have a problem that needs debugging, and a minute's thought isn't enough to reveal it, then it's usually because that mental model _is wrong_. I've spent enough time dealing with engineers who furiously insist that a system shouldn't be doing something that it clearly _is_ doing (including myself) to know that your mental model can be just as much of a barrier to debugging as it is an aid. So, as often with arguments about whether you, a smart engineer, can solve all problems with pure reason: No, you can't. There are often things that you don't know, and things that you don't know you don't know, and getting external assistance is often a huge time- and embarrassment-saver.