Article author here. I agree with your point, I shouldn't have been so cautious. I consistently observed people being faster when using debuggers and I wanted to give it a test on this problem. Most people don't see that they can get a significant speedup in using debuggers, so that sentence wanted to give a sense on how much quicker you can be. I'd be happy to hear of a better way to convince a non-debugger user that he could have debugged this code faster with a debugger!