I recently read a post called Fix Your Tools by Adolfo Ochagavía. It hit close to home because of a bad habit I think we all share as developers.
The Tunnel Vision Trap
The scenario is classic: You’re hunting a gnarly bug. You’re in “problem-solving mode.” You try to set a breakpoint, but your debugger ignores it.
What do you do?
If you’re like most of us in the heat of the moment, you ignore the broken debugger. You think, “I don’t have time to fix my tools, I have a bug to fix!” So you switch to console.log or print statements, cluttering your code and guessing at the state.
You spend hours chasing shadows because you’re debugging in the dark.
Sharpen the Saw
Adolfo’s realization was simple: Fix the darn debugger.
In his case, it was a one-line configuration change. Once he fixed his tool, he could see exactly what was happening, and the original bug was solved in minutes.
This is the essence of Stephen Covey’s 7th habit: Sharpen the Saw.
If you’re trying to cut down a tree with a dull saw, it takes forever. Stopping to sharpen the saw feels like a delay—“I’m busy sawing!”—but in reality, it’s the only way to speed up.
When to Stop and Fix
It’s tricky to know when you’re “sharpening the saw” versus falling into a rabbit hole of “yak shaving” (endlessly tweaking configs without doing real work).
Here’s my rule of thumb:
- If the tool is actively fighting you (linter crashing, debugger skipping, tests flaky), fix it immediately. You’re losing more time working around it.
- If the manual workaround is painful, like deploying via FTP instead of spending an hour on a CI script, fix it the second time it annoys you.
- If you’re just bored and reaching for a new Neovim color scheme instead of coding, that’s procrastination. Get back to work.
Next time your tools glitch while you’re working, resist the urge to power through with a workaround. Take a breath. Fix the tool. Turn the lights back on.
Debugging is hard enough. Don’t do it in the dark.