Upvoted for your very precise articulation of what encountering a bug feels like. ;)

I find it interesting that this style of development seems very familiar to me ... except for the bit about automated testing! (Bear with me.) I tend to work on small projects, and because of the way I'm wired (i.e. because I haven't rewired myself out of it), when I'm working on something larger, I can't really keep many pieces of it in my head at once. When I try to, bits which aren't drawing my attention right now will fall out of my brain, and sometimes those bits were important. So I have to focus on small pieces at a time--I'll add the minimum amount of code which should produce a new result, make sure it works, and repeat. The principle of this seems much like the principle behind TDD; I just never learned to write tests for my code.

Another comment about evaluation of tests reminds me of someone I know who's working on a project which evaluates the location and frequency of logging statements in a piece of code. I find this a very cool meta tool. Who debugs the debuggers? (If I find out he's got some public writing about this I'll link it.)