A Two-Hour Bug and the Art of Making it Look Easy
I recently shared a story about an AI-induced crash in my code, which I labeled as the hairiest bug I’ve had to deal with in 2024. The top comments on the Reddit thread of the post, however, took a different view.
Instead of discussing the bug itself, the top comments landed on a conclusion: maybe developers like me—solving “easy” bugs – are exactly the kind of people AI could replace. The thread wasn’t a debate—it had already made up its mind. Spending two hours on a debugging session? That’s amateur hour.
But what if it isn’t? What if spending weeks—or even months—on a bug is the real mark of amateur hour? If the goal is to debug faster, maybe it’s worth questioning whether long debugging sessions are really a sign of expertise, or just a sign of something broken.
Maybe, instead of accepting long debugging sessions as inevitable, we should question whether there’s something to learn from the frustrations voiced in the comments.
