Here's the situation.

Someone wrote code. It didn't do what they assumed it would do.

They come to me for help.

Here are my rules for debugging. All of them.

1. Try something else.

I don't have any other or more clever advice. When I look at someone's broken code …

I'm not even interested in psychology. But. This kind of thing seems to come up once in a great while.

You're asked (or "forced") to work with someone who—essentially—fails to cooperate. They don't actively disagree or actively suggest something better. They passively fail to agree.

In fact, they …