Debugging When You Have Little Context

I was at an event, sitting in a corner waiting for a friend. When he arrived, he sent me a message: "I'm in front of the building, should I go left or right?"

A concise question. A binary choice. But I couldn't answer him.

The building had several entrances. His "front" was not my "front." My reply was a question: "Which side of the building are you in front of?" It was a poorly worded question. His answer was the communication equivalent of a shrug: "The front."

The State of the World

When we give instructions, we make assumptions about the other person's knowledge. In programming terms, we assume we know the state of the object we're trying to command.

Imagine you have a game character. Running character.walk() seems logical, but what if the character's state is sleeping? The command fails. You need to check the state first:

switch(character.status) {
    case "awake":
        character.walk();
        break;
    case "asleep": 
        character.wakeup();
        character.standup();
        character.walk();
        break;
    default:
        system("action not supported");
}

My friend and I were missing a shared state, a shared character.status. We had a Mismatched Mental Model.

In his model, the building had one "front." In mine, it had four. His binary choice (left/right) represented eight potential paths from my perspective. The odds of a correct answer were vanishingly small.

This happens constantly. A manager says, "Increase engagement." To them, that means new sign-ups. To a developer, it might mean features for existing users. Both are "engagement," but the actions required are completely different. It’s like we're each standing on a different side of the same cube, describing the color we see, and assuming the other person sees the same thing. The word 'cube' is the same, but our context is completely different.

The Third Option: Reject the Binary

Faced with a 50/50 choice without context, you also face a 50% chance of being catastrophically wrong. The best solution is often to reject the binary entirely and choose the third option: gather more information.

Before you answer, run a State Check Protocol:

1. State: "What is our current understanding?" ("You are at the main entrance on 5th street.")
2. Goal: "What are we trying to achieve?" ("Get you to the south lobby where I am.")
3. Constraints: "What are the known obstacles?" ("You might be at a different building.")

This isn't pedantic; it's efficient. It’s the communication equivalent of "measure twice, cut once."

The Graceful Pivot

So, I asked my follow-up: "What do you see in front of you?"

He described the landmarks. The building. The street sign. And I realized the truth: he wasn't at my building. He had returned a 404 Error: Location Not Found.

The solutions "left" or "right" were now irrelevant. A robust system—whether in code or conversation—anticipates failure and handles it gracefully. It logs the unexpected state and adapts.

In code, you'd add a new case to your switch statement. In life, I simply pivoted: "Cross the street, then turn left..."

This agility is everything. It transforms rigid, error-prone processes into flexible, learning systems. It turns a frustrating miscommunication into a solved problem. And it all starts by remembering that before you tell anyone to walk(), you first need to know if they're even awake.

So the next time you're asked for a simple binary choice, remember the first principle of debugging: start by asking, "What is the current state?" It’s the fastest path to a solution.

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