I want to be honest about something that happened to me because I think it is more common than people admit. Last month I hit a bug in a service I wrote myself two years ago. Network timeout issue, intermittent, only in prod. The kind of thing I used to be able to sit with for an hour and work through methodically. I opened Claude, described the symptom, got a hypothesis, followed it, hit a dead end, fed that back, got another hypothesis. Forty minutes later I had not found the bug. I had just been following suggestions. At some point I closed the chat and tried to work through it myself. And I realized I had forgotten how to just sit with a problem. My instinct was to describe it to something else and wait for a direction. The internal monologue that used to generate hypotheses, that voic...
