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I'm actually not complaining. I coach them through it, but the primary help I give is showing them how to walk through the code, and break the dependency on log
by GrinningFool 27d ago
I'm actually not complaining. I coach them through it, but the primary help I give is showing them how to walk through the code, and break the dependency on logs/repro scenarios.[1]
In addition, if you find the issue in the code -- unless it's a really unusual race condition -- you have what you need to construct a reproduction scenario. That's also part of the coaching.
[1] At least, I did until the place I work switched everyone to vibe coding. Now I give terse responses to their LLM-generated PRs -- which usually misses the forest for the trees -- since I know that they're just going to feed my words back into the machine.
- bluefirebrand 26d agoI really disagree with this approach to debugging It's a good approach if every run of your code is very slow or very expensive, but if you can iterate quickly by running the code it's way more effective to try to reproduce and narrow it down that way I think you've been doing your juniors a disservice
- GrinningFool 26d agoLogs are great. Interactive debugging is great. Both of these can also help build an understanding of the code and systems involved. But they're just debugging tools, and they should rarely be /required/ to find a bug. I am teaching the more fundamental skill: how to (learn to) think through the problems and the systems in a way that lets log files be a useful tool instead of the only option.