Your dev machine is a poor place to reproduce bugs

This isn't about sloppiness; it's what any long-lived environment does. A library you upgraded six months ago and forgot, a config file you patched to work around something else, a system package that has drifted from what most users have: none of it feels like a decision you made, and any of it can be why a bug that's real for users doesn't happen for you. "Works on my machine" is often true and irrelevant, because your machine doesn't represent anyone.

The workflow

  • Start from a clean system, not your daily driver. A fresh cloud image of the distribution and version the report mentions is ready in about a minute; a saved base image works if you keep one for the product.
  • Install only what the report says: the exact dependency versions and steps, nothing carried over from habit.
  • Try to reproduce it, exactly as described. If it doesn't reproduce here either, that's useful: the bug probably depends on something the report didn't capture, not on your machine.
  • Debug from there once it does, knowing you're looking at the actual bug and not an interaction with your machine's history.
  • Throw the workspace away when you're done. The next bug deserves the same clean start, not this one's leftovers.

Why throwing it away matters

It's tempting to keep a working reproduction environment "in case", but that's how a second machine slowly gets the same problem as the first. A debug flag left on, a temporary patch never reverted, a log level turned up and never down: all fine for the bug you were chasing, all noise for the next one. Discard it, and the next reproduction starts from the same clean base again.

How this differs from the QA and DevOps case

The QA and DevOps workflow deals with systemic test flakiness caused by state a suite assumed was reset. This is narrower and more personal: one bug report, reproduced once, debugged once, discarded once. Same disposability underneath; a different reason to reach for it.

Related reading: the disposable VM workflow for QA and DevOps, base images as versioned infrastructure, and what a disposable development environment is. Or download Velo Workspaces and try it yourself.