Optimistic to assume that modern day programmers even know what a debugger is, or if they do, consider it as anything else than some weird ancient shibboleth only used by the greybeards ;)

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bluGill 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The greybeards rarely used debuggers, and then only to see the stack trace of a core file. They found printf better.

I can't find my copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming but that is what I recall it says. Those authors are the best known greybeards.

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Levitating 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To be fair, even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant I really only regularly used debuggers in C because it can't display arbitrary types in debug print statements.

	▲	josephg 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Debuggers still have their place in algorithm heavy work, or to pull apart heap dumps to try and figure out obscure bugs. Even LLMs use debuggers. I asked Claude to reverse engineer a closed source binary the other day. It used gdb to trace its behaviour. Didn’t even use ghidra.

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rafaelmn 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Debugger MCP better

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josephg 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But of a tangent but I think cognitive skills are starting to become like physical skills. If we don’t move our bodies, we waste away physically. If we don’t do hard cognitive work sometimes - like writing and debugging code - I worry our minds will atrophy.

I don’t have a problem with cars. But walking is still good for us.

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bluGill 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything. I know a few people who blacksmith as a hobby (often for the physical exercise as much as the work), but most people are happy not knowing how to do that job. I know how to set the air-fuel ratio on a gas engine, but I'm glad I don't need to tweak those parameters while driving (unlike a 1910s car where you did), and I won't miss oil changes on my cars as I move to electric.

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lelanthran 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything.

Are you trying to be funny?

	▲	bluGill 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Work should be worth. I'm not sure if that is me or autocorrect.

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a012 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s all /skills now