Build log: We were stuck on a debugging problem for weeks. Our least experienced developer solved it in a way none of us thought to try.

We're building autosquad with AI — Claude specifically — and we kept hitting the same wall. Agents stopping mid-workflow. Error messages referencing tools we never created. Fix one thing, two others break. Classic.

Our developers were debugging the way they'd always debugged. Isolate the problem, check the relevant section of code, ask Claude what's wrong with that part.

Didn't work. Days went by.

Here's what we eventually figured out: debugging AI-built code with the same instincts you'd use on human-written code is the wrong approach. When humans write code, bugs tend to be local. When AI builds across multiple sessions, inconsistencies accumulate at the architecture level — naming conventions, how components reference each other, how context passes between modules. The error shows up in one place. The cause is somewhere else entirely.

We were looking at the symptom. The disease was in the architecture.

The person who figured out what to do wasn't our most experienced developer. It was the newest member of the team — the one with the most limited development background.

Their suggestion: instead of showing Claude the broken section, show it the whole codebase. If AI built this, maybe AI understands it better as a whole than we do in pieces.

We were skeptical. Tried it anyway.

Claude came back with a clear diagnosis — not just the immediate cause but the chain of dependencies that created the conditions for failure. Gave us an ordered fix sequence. We followed it. Errors cleared. Took less time than any of the individual debugging sessions we'd been running for days.

The thing that stuck with us: the person who solved this had the least attachment to the old debugging instinct. That turned out to be the advantage. In a field changing this fast, experience can be a liability when it's too confidently applied to a context it wasn't built for.

Has anyone else run into this? Curious how other teams are approaching debugging in AI-heavy codebases.