The Importance of Debugging and Struggle in Learning to Code

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” — Helen Keller

That time when you learned to ride a bicycle, and you had some painful falls. When you had to learn to cook because you were alone in college. Or when you learned to dance because of the girl you liked.

These moments require you to dive in and learn, facing doubt, tension, pain, and distress, yet they leave a lasting impression that ensures you never forget the lesson.

Coding is just one more of these things. If you’ve experienced the pain of fixing a code before delivering results for the next day, or staying long hours at night debugging something you don’t understand, you’ll have a good grasp on how to solve those problems.

LLM’s are significantly lowering the barrier for people to #vibecoding, but is that code reliable? Will it break when you least expect it?

I believe these are amazing tools to improve your efficiency in developing software, as long as you guide them on what to do, and not the other way.

So the next time you get an error in your code, resist the urge to ask Claude or ChatGPT for a sec. Trace the issue, patch it yourself, then let the LLM to tidy things up.

The code you sweat over today is code you can stand behind tomorrow.