debugging strategy: try out a new tool
(are there any major categories of tools I'm missing here?)
I'm also trying to figure out if there's more advice to give about how/when to try out new tools. right now I just have "try to do it when you're in a low-stress situation"
@b0rk If these are "one-shot" tools (i.e. not really interactive ones, the tool gets a request and spits out some output, you usually amend the request a few times, but nothing depends on previous requests) then I'd try them when I suspect I'll want to have a very good in-depth understanding of what's wrong (and how the parts that were broken work normally).
This is a good opportunity to learn how what that tool says related to real world, because you anyway intend to become very sure about the state of the real world, so will be in a position to notice tool's quirks. If you start using a tool in cases where you will stop at shallow understanding of the world around the problem, you'll have no way to realize that you're using the tool incorrectly.
Why specifically for one-shot tools? Because with interactive tools this approach of slightly distrusting the tool is sadly too impractical.
