What is one debugging technique you wish you had learned years earlier?

Rubber-duck debugging—explaining the code step-by-step out loud to an empathetic listener or object—completely shifted my approach to problem-solving. When a environmental sensor pipeline kept silently dropping data, explaining the logical flow aloud instantly exposed a flawed conditional statement that hours of line-by-line tracing missed.

Writing a minimal failing test before touching a single line of production code is the ultimate game-changer for speed and precision. It systematically isolates the defect from external noise, saving me days of trial-and-error during critical production deployment outages.