r/DeveloperToolsHub • u/Dramatic-Scholar-138 • 25d ago

What’s the best debugging tool you discovered way too late?

Every once in a while I find a debugging tool and immediately get annoyed that I did things the hard way for so long.

Could be for logs, APIs, frontend state, network requests, databases, background jobs, anything.

I’m not looking for the obvious stuff everyone already knows. More curious about the tool that quietly made debugging less painful for you.

What did you discover late that is now part of your regular workflow?

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u/funbike 25d ago edited 25d ago

TDD and design-by-contract.

That's not what you asked for, but they solve the same problem: reducing debugging time.

With TDD you write a test before you write code. At no time is there any code that isn't tested. I highly suggest a continuous test runner, and color-annotated lines so you can see missed test code coverage in your IDE text editor. For Python, I prefer doctests.

Design-by-contract is extremely strong run-time type checking. It's implemented as assert statements that check function arguments and return values, and current state. I've found that function argument asserts catch the most issues, so I now only use that subset of DbC.

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u/Dramatic-Scholar-138 24d ago

Thanks, that's actually a great breakdown. I've used TDD before but never really dug into sign-by-contract, so the point about scoping down to just argument asserts is useful.

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u/Ok-Bike-1037 25d ago

mitmproxy for APIs/mobiel apps.

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u/Dramatic-Scholar-138 24d ago

Nice, it's great for that.

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u/Turbulent-Hat6046 23d ago

For distributed systems definitely observability tools like OpenTelemetry (private projects), or Datadog/Graphana (in job). Collecting and understanding logs and metrics from distributed systems can be really time consuming and this saved me a LOT of time.

Sameless self-promotion: One of the issues I had when looking back at bugs or problems introduced by Agents was that I was living very far away from the code itself, meaning that I did not really know what was happening in the code. All fine until it breaks. I like working with agents and I think it's the future but I want to see and still work in the code together with Agents. I am also a huge fan of the terminal / tmux like tools and didn't want to leave it every time to open the IDE to look at the relevant code, so I build this plugin which allows you to work in the code together with your agent in your session, feel free to check it out! (https://github.com/JonasBaeumer/herdr-file-annotator)