What's a bug? What's a debugger?
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company discuss the philosophy and mechanics of debugging, arguing that the term 'debugger' is regrettable and that tools should focus on observability and understanding system behavior rather than just fixing reproducible errors. They critique traditional in-situ breakpoint debugging for its fragility ('killing the patient') and advocate for post-mortem analysis, memory forensics, and tools like DTrace and Hubris. The conversation highlights how modern practices like CI/CD and languages like Rust have shifted the debugging landscape, making traditional debuggers less relevant for simple errors but more critical for complex, distributed system pathologies.