Cursor's Debug Mode Enforces Good Debugging Practices

The article discusses how Cursor's debug mode improves the debugging process by enforcing best practices, such as generating hypotheses, adding instrumentation, and iterating until the fix is proven, rather than just relying on AI to guess the solution.

Details

The article discusses how Cursor's debug mode works differently from traditional AI-assisted debugging, which often involves simply copying logs into a chat and having the AI guess the solution. Cursor's debug mode, on the other hand, sets up instrumentation, captures logs, and iterates until the fix is proven. The interesting part is not the AI itself, but the process it enforces. The article describes a specific bug related to pagination on an external API integration, where the code looked correct but every request returned the same first page. Instead of jumping to a fix, Cursor's debug mode generated hypotheses, added instrumentation to test each one, and asked the user to reproduce the bug. This process of iterating through hypotheses, adding instrumentation, and verifying the fix is what the article highlights as the key value of Cursor's debug mode. It enforces good debugging practices that developers should already be following, such as hypotheses before fixes, documentation checks, and proof of the fix through actual runtime data.