February 22, 2026
When bug fixing becomes life fixing
Fix Your Tools
Programmer fixes the wrong thing, internet screams: “PUT THE AXE DOWN”
TLDR: A developer wasted time fighting a bug because his broken debugging tool wasn’t working, then finally fixed the tool with a simple change and solved everything. The comments exploded into a funny, very real debate about when improving your tools is smart preparation and when it’s just polished procrastination.
A programmer told a simple story: he couldn’t find a nasty bug, his “pause here” debugging tool refused to cooperate, and instead of fixing the tool, he spent ages hacking around the problem. Only later did he realize the fix was a one-line setting. Moral of the story: fix your tools. But the real show was the comments section.
The top reaction? Pure chaos energy. One commenter warned this is how you end up “shaving a yak” — a meme about starting with one tiny task and somehow waking up three days later building your own tools from scratch. Another brought out the “sharpen your axe” wisdom: if you’ve got six hours to chop a tree, spend four getting the axe razor sharp. The crowd split into two camps: Team Sharpen Everything and Team For The Love Of God, Just Ship It.
Some users called tools “effort multipliers” and argued that investing in them is obvious, if you’re going to use them a lot. Others fired back with confessions of spending days “endlessly tweaking” their setup instead of doing any actual work. One commenter nailed the mood with a self-drag: “fix your tools… then for the love of productivity, stop fixing your tools and fix the real problem” — a punchline every procrastinating perfectionist felt in their soul.
Key Points
- •A maintainer of an open source library encountered a difficult bug that was hard to diagnose.
- •The developer attempted to debug the issue by setting a breakpoint, but the debugger ignored the breakpoint despite the code being executed.
- •Instead of fixing the debugger immediately, the developer initially resorted to adding logging and extra troubleshooting code, which did not resolve the issue.
- •The root cause of the debugger problem was a simple one-line configuration change that, once applied, restored proper debugging behavior.
- •With the debugger fixed, the developer was able to inspect the program in detail and successfully solve the original bug, leading to the lesson to fix tools first.