i roughly did that. it's not working yet, bugs remain. something i do more as a norm now is `import pdb; pdb.set_trace()` where-ever i want to look at information to resolve the error. this seems to really ease debugging when very confused. no need to do the breakpoints/conditions dance. no need to worry about whether or not i ran it in a debugger. can just code the condition right in. i'm thinking this would probably work in other languages. link to a a debugger, open it when the assertion fails. i'm sure people do that already in large projects, maybe i used to. but now it seems a good norm. one of the reasons i avoid nodejs is the difficulty i used to have debugging it (and a frightening interpreter error i ran into). i bet there are a lot of nodejs debugging libraries now, that could be just opened when a chunk of code is added in.