AI & LLMs
What is debugging?
Debugging is the process of finding why software is behaving incorrectly and fixing the cause, as opposed to guessing at changes until the symptom goes away.
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Technical definition
Debugging is the systematic diagnosis and correction of defects. The method is investigative: reproduce the failure reliably, narrow the conditions under which it occurs, form a hypothesis about the cause, test that hypothesis, and verify the fix resolves the failure without introducing another.
The distinction that matters is between the symptom and the cause. Suppressing a symptom without identifying the cause leaves the defect in place, usually to reappear somewhere less convenient.
In plain terms
Debugging is working out why something is broken before changing anything.
The temptation is to start changing things. That sometimes makes the symptom disappear and rarely fixes the problem.
Why it matters
If AI built your app, debugging is the skill that decides whether you can maintain it, and you can do it without reading code.
The process is the same regardless of technical background. Reproduce it, so you can tell whether a fix worked. Narrow it: does it happen for every user or one, on every device or one, always or only after a particular step. Read the error, because the actual message is more informative than the fact that something failed. Then describe all of that when you ask for a fix.
That last step is where most people lose time. "The booking form is broken" produces guesswork. "Submitting the booking form with a date more than 30 days out shows a loading spinner that never resolves, and the browser console says 400 Bad Request" produces a fix.
One rule saves the most trouble: change one thing at a time. Five simultaneous changes make it impossible to know which one helped, and one of them probably broke something else.
