Last Tuesday I sat staring at a stack trace for forty minutes. Production was down, my pager was screaming, and I couldn't think. Not because the bug was hard — it was a null pointer in a service I'd written six months earlier. I just didn't know how to start anymore. I used to know. I used to read a stack trace top to bottom, form three hypotheses, and start eliminating them. Somewhere over the past year that muscle quietly atrophied. I'd been outsourcing the first 80% of every debugging session to autocomplete and chat assistants, and when the assistant couldn't help (because it didn't know our codebase), I froze. If any of that sounds familiar, this post is for you. Let's walk through the actual technical problem, why it happens, and a debugging workflow you can rebuild from scratch. The problem: hypothesis-free debugging The symptom looks like this. You see an error. Instead of asking what could cause this , you paste the error somewhere and wait for a suggestion.…