It Worked on My Machine: Debugging Without the Screenshot Olympics

Every developer has lived their own version of “it worked on my machine.” Mine involved a client who stayed after a CrossFit class so I could debug a broken payment flow with them, outdoors, on their laptop, armed with blurry WhatsApp screenshots and bug reports that made no sense. I even found myself explaining how to open the browser network tab to someone who’d never seen DevTools. In this talk, I’m bringing that same 2020 app back to life, a weekend React-and-Rails project held together by hope, to see how we’d tackle those same problems today. We’ll look at how modern full-stack session recordings and AI-assisted IDEs turn that chaos into context in a world where we now ship vibe-coded apps faster than ever.