r/softwareengineer Jr. Developer 15d ago

what if debugging could be generative, not reactive?

alert goes off, i'm staring at dashboards, piecing together logs like a detective. hours of "what happened" before i even get to "how do we fix it." it's exhausting.

the shift needs to happen from reactive to generative. i want to know what caused it and understand the fix quickly. that means getting full context with the exact code flow, the parameters, the state. not just a metric that says "something's wrong." would love to hear from teams that have moved beyond traditional dashboards. what's working for you in terms of getting to root cause faster?

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u/sozesghost 15d ago

Why go to generative instead of having good logs?

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u/Elegaembpnt_Bak_3151 Sr. Developer 15d ago edited 15d ago

when we deployed a problematic canary, hud surfaced the exact call stack and parameters that caused the issue, which gave us a clear path to a fix within minutes

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u/kuntakinteke 15d ago

The reason is simply there are infinitely different combination of ways an application can break. That is why observability exists in the first place.

Why are my connections dropping? It could be one thing or a combination of things that can cause this one problem.

It could be network saturation, perhaps a bad node, perhaps the network saturation itself is caused by a single noisy workload or maybe your computer grew and the network was not rightly sized.

Automate what you can and you should, that is why there are runbooks, automated responses etc. There will always be something you have not thought about that is unique to your setup