Carragee Consulting

Debugging Course and Minimum Reproducible Examples

Bethany Lyons recently made me think about the future of education for developers in the age of LLMs which can write some basic code.

I wonder where courses focused on debugging are being developed and what the role is for professional services like “office hours” exist in helping remove blockers.

A while ago I was watching McElreath’s statistics course and I learned the term Minimal Reproducible Examples (MRE). I wrote this blog post as sort of a PSA:

“If you go to Stack Overflow [updated this to public LLMs where you’re data becomes training data] or anywhere to request help debugging your code, make sure you have reproducible steps others can follow without having to download your proprietary data.”

The value of creating a MRE could actually be to figure out the answer to your problem on your own as you try to generalize the specific failure as a repeatable problem, but creating it will also help you protect the IP you’ve likely agreed to steward in your NDA.

It seems like the market for expert level help, which isn’t currently available from LLMs, will grow rapidly until the technology is more effective than the current practitioners.

In order for those experts to add value, those coming to the expert’s office hours will need to be able present their questions will respecting their companies data governance rules.

I’d love to hear if anyone has taken an error message decoding or debugging specific dev class and also how you envision the future of human/machine teaming in coding.