Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?

My reason for the truncation is that the thinking isn't just about what tests to write to validate the semantics you want, but what semantics do you even WANT? Happy path may take an hour to figure out, but getting to a point (for a reasonably complex system) where I feel confident that I've enumerated the "perimiter" of the mental model such that there are fewer surprises, gotchas, odd edge cases, usually takes significantly more contemplation of the problem space than modern big-co "DELIVER FEATURES NOW NOW NOW" would often like, certainly more time than spent actually implementing, by and large.

(you may sense some bitterness, it is largely because a respected mentor of mine made significant effort to stress to me that if I'm leaning on a debugger, or having to printf a lot, I probably don't UNDERSTAND what's going and and can fall prey to far more severe logical issues; and despite my observation that I became a far more robust engineer utilizing this strategy, it's often hard to incentivise balancing this against simply shipping, especially given the difficulty of empirically justifying "I need a day to think really hard about this problem to make sure it's not subtlety wrong" against the rebuttal of "what's the ROI")

I believe that more time spent debugging, the worse the code you're debugging is. Now if you're spending most of your time debugging your own code, then likely you're a novice who hasn't learned the many ways to write quality code that "just works".

If, on the other hand, you inherited a codebase from someone who did not follow the tenet of "develop your code as if the next maintainer is an axe murderer who knows where you live", then spending a great deal of time debugging is understandable and likely unavoidable.

Personally, during the time that I get paid for programming, most of my time is spent writing tests and developing features.

On the side, however, I have a project that I inherited from someone who clearly never intended to have another person look at the code, and most of my time is spent spelunking and debugging (and slowly replacing every last line).

But I have the luxury to work in a result-oriented environment with people too experienced to fall for "agile". So I can spend half of my week in a cafe with pen & paper as long as the project is done by Friday night.