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← RoadmapDay 7 of 90Foundations2h 10m

How to debug anything without guessing

By the end of today you can take a bug you cannot explain and narrow it to a single line by halving the search space, rather than changing things until the symptom disappears.

YesterdayOn Day 6 you learned to read a trace when Python tells you what broke. Today handles the harder case, where nothing crashes and the answer is simply wrong.

TomorrowTomorrow you leave the editor and learn the terminal, where most debugging actually happens.

01

Why this matters

Debugging is the skill you will use most and be taught least. Everything from a failed test on Day 47 to a wrong retrieval on Day 76 is the same method applied to a bigger system.

  • Reproduce first
  • Bisecting
  • Hypothesis debugging
  • Using a debugger
02

Learn it

70 min

Copy this into Claude or ChatGPT. It quizzes you before it explains anything, which is deliberate. The resources under it are how you check what it told you.

Today's Master Prompt

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A prompt written for this day alone: your level, the exact scope, what to leave out, and an instruction to quiz you before it explains anything. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and it teaches you today's material.

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Check it against something that is not a model

An assistant can be fluent and wrong, and on a topic you met today you will not catch it. These cover the same ground and were made by people who do this for a living, so they are what you hold the explanation up against. They are other people's work and we only link to them, so judge them for yourself.

3 hand-picked resources

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Videos, official docs and articles covering the same ground, each opened and annotated by hand. They are what you check the assistant against on a day you cannot yet catch it being wrong.

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03

Build it

40 min

Take any script you have written this week and deliberately break it in a way that does not raise an exception, for example an off-by-one in a slice or a wrong comparison operator. Leave it overnight if you can. Then find it by bisection, writing down each hypothesis before you test it.

04

Recall it

20 min

Answer out loud, reveal, then mark honestly whether you had it. That score is the only thing on this page you do not get to choose.

4 recall questions

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Questions you answer from memory, then grade yourself against the real answer. The score is carried into the mastery rating below it, so an honest miss cannot quietly become a tick.

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05

Rate it

Completion and mastery are tracked separately. Be honest, because an inflated rating only means the concept resurfaces sooner.

Mastery tracking

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Rate yourself against five named criteria per concept. Completion and mastery are tracked separately, and anything you rate shakily comes back automatically on a spaced schedule.

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06

Recap

  • 01A bug you cannot reproduce cannot be fixed, only disturbed
  • 02Predict before you check, so every attempt produces evidence
  • 03Halve the search space instead of reading top to bottom
  • 04Silent wrong answers need the same method, not more staring

Your progress

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Mark days complete, pick up where you left off across devices, and watch completion and mastery diverge. Free, and the account exists only so ninety days of work cannot vanish with a cleared browser.

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