Following breadcrumbs in code

Abstract Developers frequently insert temporary print or log statements—ad-hoc logs—to better understand program behavior at runtime, particularly when facing unexpected issues or complex control flows. Despite being a nearly universal practice, systematic study has been limited because these logs are ephemeral: they usually remain only in local environments and are removed before code is committed, making them difficult to capture. In this work, we addressed this challenge by mining accidental commits where developers unintentionally left ad-hoc logs and later deleted them, and by analyzing live-streamed programming sessions to observe their use in practice. Using these methods, we constructed a large dataset across three major programming languages (Java, JavaScript, and Python), enabling the large-scale investigation of logging practices. Our analysis reveals both common and language-specific patterns in where and how developers rely on ad-hoc logs. Across languages, ad-hoc logs tend to appear in program regions that are harder to reason about at runtime. We also identify distinctive language-level patterns, such as frequent use in asynchronous and callback functions in JavaScript and in thread-related classes in Java. In addition, functions containing ad-hoc logs generally have higher cyclomatic complexity than the overall function population. Production logs show a similar association, consistent with logging serving as a means of observing runtime behavior in structurally complex functions. Together, these findings provide empirical insight into developers’ runtime comprehension practices and offer a valuable dataset for researchers and tool builders seeking to better support debugging and logging.