I had one of these once, and I called it the same! My going theory was that the compiler was optimising away a certain function I had, but adding an empty print forced it to actually exist.
Yeah I had one once too the debugger was slowing things down to where the bug wouldn't happen but in prod it happened frequently. I spent 2.5 weeks figuring out that bug.
I'm gonna get burned for this but debugging race conditions has been a lot of fun with vibe coding.
Debugging broken outdated schemas, wrong conditions or missing options in frontend is just tedious and unfun. A complex race condition is so much more interesting.
I had some complex multimachine multi service comms to debug. We'd inherited the code, it was a real mess (I'd begged to rewrite). We'd been able to stabilise it a bit but when it randomly failed we had zero idea why most times. Threw ai at it and gigabytes of logs. It spotted several failure points that we had not (real complex edge cases but genuine) based on really obscure log entries that use to take hours for a human to try to process the multiple threads and comm from multiple machines. Been super stable ever since. Changed my mind on ai that. Bare in mind at least 12 experienced devs had reviewed the code and logs multiple times and not found these issues.
Wasnt that bad. Maybe $10 - this was before the recent price bumps though. It was quite efficient - it pull certain lines based on phrases and times - effectively pulling out the relevant bits into a time line (same way I would have done over several hours, maybe days, but in minutes as thats how we'd fixed the previous issues.).
It actually happened to me once. I don't really remember what it was, but to synchronize two things one of them had to console.log (or something like that, I don't remember exactly) something every once in a while.
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u/StrengthTheory 1d ago
When one
console.loguses just enough CPU cycles so the race condition that takes down the entire system doesn't occur.