this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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To those who have played around with LLM code generation more than me, how are they at debugging?
I'm thinking of Kernighan's Law: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." If vibe coding reduces the complexity of writing code by 10x, but debugging remains just as difficult as before, then Kernighan's Law needs to be updated to say debugging is 20x as hard as vibe coding. Vibe coders have no hope of bridging that gap.
I use it extensively daily.
It cannot step through code right now, so true debugging is not something you use it for. Most of the time the llm will take the junior engineer approach of "guess and check" unless you explicitly give it better guidance.
My process is generally to start with unit tests and type definitions, then a large multipage prompt for every segment of the app the llm will be tasked with. Then I'll make a snapshot of the code, give the tool access to the markdown prompt, and validate its work. When there are failures and the project has extensive unit tests it generally follows the same pattern of "I see that this failure should be added to the unit tests" which it does and then re-executes them during iterative development.
If tests are not available or if it is not something directly accessible to the tool then it will generally rely on logs either directly generated or provided by the user.
My role these days is to provide long well thought out prompts, verify the integrity of the code after every commit, and generally just kind of treat the llm as a reckless junior dev. Sometimes junior devs can surprise you, like yesterday I was very surprised by a one shot result: asking for a mobile rn app for taking my rambling voice recordings and summarize them into prompts, it was immediately remarkably successful and now I've been walking around mic'd up to generate prompts.