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You missed various less-direct but often just as effective kinds of questions:

“Can you find the mistake here?”

“Is there a mistake here?”

“Could there be a mistake here?”

“Did you test this part?”

Better still is to be specific:

“What happens if «specific edge case»?”

“I did it that way one time, but ran into «concrete problem».”

“Your way here works just as well, but doesn’t match our conventions.”




I can't imagine how much time you must have available to be able to respond to an error with:

> Could there be a mistake here?

in place of simply correcting and then getting back on track with actually solving a presumably difficult problem. <<The Zone>> is a fleeting thing, especially with two programmers. Such nebulous, passive language seems like a guaranteed way to disrupt any kind of flow state.




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