I don’t think it’s necessarily something to be “guilty” for. Especially if it’s someone else’s code I’m debugging, I agree that rewriting it “in my own words” can be a great way to understand what’s going on. Like you said, its not like you have to check in the changes.

However it sounds like people are talking about refactoring an app solely for the purpose of hoping that the refactor shakes out whatever bugs. That sounds like the debugging equivalent of “8 hours of coding saved me 30 minutes of planning”