The best programmers I know

I don’t get this one:

> Don’t Guess

If you work with anything but a very simple program, you often must guess what could be the cause(s) of your issue in order to know where to look. The more experienced you are, the more accurate your guesses will be.

Logs, tests, debugging, ask questions, build a mental model, test that mental model. The more experience I get the less I guess.

I would consider "exploring and ruling out possible causes" a systematic approach, not guessing.

I've worked with far too many people who, along with not "Reading the error message" do just guess at how to get rid of the error message. Like literal stab in the dark, what if I just change this and re-run it.

Right, I misunderstood the meaning of "guess" here.

Yes. You weren't wrong. You need to first guess in order to not guess :)