abacusai/abacusai-bot/debugging

Debugging

The failure mode to avoid is plausible-guess-then-change. Each guess that "looks right" and does not fix it leaves behind an edit that now has to be un-reasoned about later.

Order of operations

1. Reproduce it, reliably. If you cannot reproduce it on demand, you cannot know you fixed it. An intermittent bug that "seems fine now" is a bug you have not fixed. Find the smallest input that triggers it.

2. Read the actual error. All of it: the message, the type, and the deepest frame in your code, not the top frame in a library. Stack traces are read bottom-up for cause and top-down for context.

3. Verify your assumptions before theorising. Most stuck debugging is a false premise: the function is not being called, the config is not what you think, the file on disk is not the one being loaded, the build is stale. Print the value. Do not reason about what it should be.

4. Bisect. Halve the search space each step, in whichever dimension is cheapest:

• time: git bisect, or diff against the last known-good commit
• code path: does it fail with the middle layer stubbed out?
• input: does half the input still trigger it?

5. Fix the cause, not the symptom. A try/except around the error, a null-check on the crash line, or a retry loop each make the symptom disappear while leaving the bug. If you cannot explain why the fix works, you have not found it.

6. Prove it. Re-run the reproduction from step 1. Then check the fix did not break the neighbours.

Techniques worth reaching for

• Print debugging is not beneath you. It beats a debugger for anything

timing-related, concurrent, or inside a hot loop.

• Rubber-ducking works because stating the assumption out loud is what

exposes it as an assumption.

• When it works in one environment and not another, diff the environments:

versions, env vars, working directory, permissions, clock, locale.

• When it broke "for no reason", something changed. A dependency resolved to

a new version, a cache expired, a certificate rolled, data grew past a limit.

• Intermittent almost always means concurrency, ordering, timing, uninitialised

memory, network, or a clock. That list is short: walk it.

Say what you found

When reporting, separate what you observed from what you concluded. "The request returns 403 and the token is empty" is an observation. "Auth is broken" is a conclusion, and it might be wrong.