I suspect that GP was talking about some notetaking tactics to systematically narrow things down while throwing educated guesses against the wall. Because so mu

I suspect that GP was talking about some notetaking tactics to systematically narrow things down while throwing educated guesses against the wall. Because so much of debugging is running in circles and trying the same thing again. No amount of notetaking can completely remove that, because mistakes in the observation are just as much an error candidate as the code you observe, I'm convinced that some "almost formalization" routine could help a lot. Good points on the tool side. While "debugger driven development" is rightfully considered an anti-pattern, the tool-shaming that sometimes emerges from that consideration is a huge mistake.