Interesting. I always viewed the interface to a debugger as its greatest flaw—who wants to grapple with an interface reimplementing the internals of a language half as well when you can simply type, save, commit, and reproduce?
I'm using IntelliJ for a Java project that takes a very long time to rebuild, re-spin and re-test. For E2E tests a 10-minute turn-around time would be blazingly fast.
But because of the tooling, once I've re-spun I can connect a debugger to the JVM and click a line in IntelliJ to set a breakpoint. Combined, that takes 5 seconds.
If I need to make small changes at that point I can usually rebuild it out exactly in the debugger to see how it executes, all while paused at that spot.
i do, because it's much faster than typing, saving, and rebuilding, etc.