Comment by ivlad

While I somewhat support the idea of avoiding debug-mode applications shipped to end customers, it seems in this particular case Brendan argues about the need to debug binaries in runtime on the server side. If there is a binary component running in production, the choice of running it with debug enabled (and/or with an ability to activate debug in runtime) is purely choice of the system owners (who nowadays are both the developers and the operators of components).

“Observability” primarily refers to ability to view system state beyond of what blackbox monitoring does. Again, the term primarily refers to server side operations and not to software shipped to end users.

As much as spying on users is ugly, it’s not related to debugging server side.