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yeah, tons dont know they exist. But there's also a lot of people - new and veteran - who are just allergic to them, for various reasons.

Setting up a debugger is the very first thing i do when i start working with a new language, and always use it to explore the code on new projects.

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These days I'll just dump all relevant code into an LLM and have it explained to me instantly.

Being able to ask questions about the parts that are unclear (or just plain wrong) is so much easier than trying to cram the entire thing into my brain RAM.

In my experience it actually helps me learn faster too, since I rarely get stumped on random gotcha's anymore.

Nah, i use debuggers all the time despite also using LLM agent all the time. They are great, but limited and often just go into a perpetual loop of not being able to debug something. I toss in some breakpoints and figure out exactly what is going on.

With VSCode it's often a 10 minute job to set up. We are spoiled! Back in the VS days using a Microsoft stack it was just there. Click to add breakpoint then F5.

when i first started programming, with php, it took me literally weeks to figure out how to get xdebug set up. (pro tip: just use DDEV - it makes it all simple).

Not a second of that was a waste because xdebug (like all debuggers) is just that amazing.

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