The Wrong Way to Use AI for Debugging (And the Mental Model That Actually Works)

Same AI tool. Same codebase access. Same staging incident. Three experienced engineers spent hours and couldn't find the root cause. I found it in about 20 minutes — and I barely knew what half the tools did. This isn't a story about juniors being better than seniors. It's about a mental model for AI collaboration that anyone can use — and why the "obvious" way most people use AI actually holds them back. The Incident A message hits the team Slack channel: "Staging is broken. We're investigating." The error: alembic current ERROR: Can't locate revision identified by 'ba29cdc8739d' FAILED: Can't locate revision identified by 'ba29cdc8739d' For context: Alembic is a database migration tool for Python. Every migration has a unique revision ID. The staging database thought it was on a revision that didn't exist in the codebase. Someone had run a migration from code that was never merged. How the Investigation Went — The Usual Way Three experienced engineers jumped on it. They had full acce