Coming from a paradigm of being able to read code and understand what it does, having to drop into console to poke at things, even just to then find the source

Coming from a paradigm of being able to read code and understand what it does, having to drop into console to poke at things, even just to then find the source for a given function, was extremely unintuitive to me. At this point I always have a rails console up, just to be able to poke at objects and whatnot, but it feels... clunky. Similarly, when designing system changes I first go through with breakpoints in an existing flow to see what objects and behavior actually are when invoked, because I can't tell just from reading the code half the time--and that drives me bananas.