Coding agents can use debuggers if they need to.

From what I've seen they're more likely to run a python -c "import your_code; your_code.do_stuff()" experiment to figure out what's going on though.

I have not used a debugger in anger in perhaps a decade. I write tests, and if that's not enough, I write more tests.

Tests stick around and prevent future problems, whereas the debugger only shows me something once.

But tests show you if a bug is happening, they don’t help you understand the underlying cause of the bug. In a decade, you haven’t hit a compiler codegen issue, a silicon erratum, a race condition, or anything that required actually spending effort understanding the causal path?

I don't know what to tell you besides that I've found more, better bugs using comprehensive testing than I ever found with a debugger.

The sole exception to that is that, back in the very early days, troubleshooting IE6 really required a debugger. But everything else, from memory leaks to thread hang issues to deadlocks, testing is better.

> Do you not need to use the debugger sometimes? Or can cc debug by itself

A key feature of AI coding assistants and coding agents is troubleshooting. It turns out that LLMs excel at pattern matching, specially when coupled with feedback signals. It turns out that troubleshooting represents just that. A few years ago people searched the likes of stack overflow to fix problems, and it turns out LLMs can do the equivalent of that much faster.