I keep coming back to this: the best debugging habit I’ve seen is just writing down the exact state before you touch anything. Not a clever trick, just enough context that you can come back two hours later and still know what changed.
I learned that the hard way on a CI issue that turned out to be a race condition between two tests sharing a port. Has anyone else found a habit that actually survives when the bug report gets handed to someone else?
Writing down state is half of it; the part that survives handoff is a “one-command repro” that starts from a clean slate. Even a scrappy make repro or npm test -- <pattern> that sets the env vars, pins the port (or randomizes it), and prints the exact commit hash saves hours when someone else picks it up. Notes are great, but if the next person can’t make it fail in under two minutes, they’ll “fix” the wrong thing out of desperation.
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