When a bug shows up, do you read the stack trace yourself or paste it to your coding agent first?
A failing test or a stack trace used to mean the same first move for most of us: read it, form a guess, open the file. With a coding agent in the terminal, there is a second option that takes a few seconds. Paste the err
A failing test or a stack trace used to mean the same first move for most of us: read it, form a guess, open the file. With a coding agent in the terminal, there is a second option that takes a few seconds. Paste the error, let the agent read the code around it, and see what it comes back with.
Both paths have a cost. Reading it yourself is slower, but you keep the mental model of the code, and you notice when the bug is a symptom of something larger. Handing it over first is faster for the boring cases, yet the agent can fix the line that threw instead of the reason it threw, and a patch that makes the error go away is not the same as a fix.
We would like to hear what your first move looks like today:
- When a bug appears, who looks at it first, you or the agent?
- Which kinds of bugs do you never hand over, and why?
- Has an agent ever "fixed" a bug by hiding it? How did you find out?
Tell us about your own debugging routine in the comments below, including the times it went wrong.
Originally published by Dev.to AI. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes — full credit and traffic to the original publisher.