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Cake day: August 7th, 2025

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  • This does sound very interesting. I should have said the debuggers I’m familiar with don’t do it. Or if they do, I have no idea how.

    Certainly setting breakpoints on certain conditions instead of just a line, would help a lot. Being able to step backwards through the execution even more so.


  • I can also see the variables change by logging them.

    Debuggers are great if you want to see in detail what’s going on in a specific loop or something, but across a big application with a framework that handles lots of things in unreadable code, multiple components modifying your state, async code, etc.; debuggers are a terrible way to track what’s going on.

    And often when I’ve found where it goes wrong, I want to check what was happening in a previous bit of code, a previous iteration or call. Debuggers don’t go back; you have to restart and run through the whole thing, again finding exactly where it went wrong, but now just a bit before that, which is often impossible.

    With logging, you just log everything, print a big warning where the thing has gone wrong, and scroll back a bit.

    Debuggers are a fantastic bit of technology, but in practice, simple logging has helped me far more often. That said, there are issues where debuggers do beat logging, but they’re a small minority in my experience. Still useful to know both tools.












  • I’ve found it’s pretty good at refactoring existing code to use a different but well-supported and well documented library. It’s absolutely terrible for a new and poorly documented library.

    I recently tried using Copilot with Claude to implement something in a fairly young library, and did get the basics working, including a long repetitive string of “that doesn’t work, I’m getting error msg [error]”. Seven times of that, and suddenly it worked! I was quite amazed, though it failed me in many other ways with that library (imagining functions and options that don’t exist). But then redoing the same thing in the older, better supported library, it got it right on the first try.

    But maybe the biggest advantage of AI coding is that it allows me to code when my brain isn’t fully engaged. Of course the risk there is that my brain might not fully engage because of the AI.