Im currently pulling my hair out trying to fix some memory leaks in a legacy node.js backend that my team just inherited. Its basically a black box at this point and we have a super tight deadline of three weeks to stabilize the whole thing before our next big release in the US market. I started playing around with Claude Code to help me parse through the mess because manual log checking is just killing my productivity.

I spent a few hours reading up on it online, and I saw some people swear by using it for unit test generation, while others say you should just feed it entire directory structures to let it map out the dependency graph. Honestly, those answers feel kinda generic? Like, yeah, I get that it can read code, but everyone just keeps saying it is amazing without explaining how to actually prompt it for deep debugging sessions without it hallucinating or getting lost in the boilerplate. When I try to dump too much context, it starts giving me these weirdly confident but totally wrong paths to follow.

Ive got about 50 bucks a month I can throw at this if I need to upgrade any specific tooling or tokens, but I really just need to know how you guys are actually using it for backend stuff. Do you have a specific workflow? Like, do you treat it more like a rubber duck that you feed specific error traces to, or are you letting it write the fix scripts? I feel like Im missing some fundamental trick here because it keeps trying to rewrite my controller logic when the actual issue is buried somewhere in the database connection pooling or middleware. If you have any tips on what actually sticks for efficient debugging, I am all ears...