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by flohofwoe20 hours ago |
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upvoteby bluGill19 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby Levitating19 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby josephg19 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby koyote9 hours ago|
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> even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant

I guess it depends on the bugs.

LLMs even INSIDE the (VS) debugger couldn't work out some of the more recent bugs I have been looking at. Never mind by statically looking at the code base.

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upvoteby rafaelmn20 hours ago|
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Debugger MCP better
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upvoteby josephg19 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby bluGill18 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby lelanthran16 hours ago|
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> Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything.

Are you trying to be funny?

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upvoteby bluGill16 hours ago|
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Work should be worth. I'm not sure if that is me or autocorrect.
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upvoteby lelanthran13 hours ago|
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It was unintentionally funny then :-)

If I'd accidentally written a comment asking whether the intellectual skills I am losing are worth keeping, and make 2x spelling errors in a single short sentence, I'd find the unintended irony hilarious.

(but that's me, maybe you don't find accidental errors that you make to sometimes be funny)

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upvoteby a01220 hours ago|
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It’s all /skills now
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