1. Open up the Python interpreter (highly recommend installing iPython in your project venv so you can use it as the default interpreter in Pycharm)

2. Setup toy data to prototype the thing you are trying to do (or just load in some data or a pickled file, etc.)

3. Start prototyping the functionality of your code one step at a time. If things need to be in a loop in your main script: eg: `for thing in things:` , I just set `thing = things[0]` in the REPL and then continue prototyping the logic of what goes in the inner loop.

4. Use the variable viewer, printing variables in the REPL, etc to make sure things are doing what you want

5. As sequences of statements are verified as doing what you want, you just "graduate" them to your script so you in effect know that they are somewhat tested and do what you wanted

6. Get to a point where you get the right result you were looking for

7. Now set `thing = things[4]` or some other edge-case and just run it a few times to make sure you still get the right result.

8. You're good to go. Wrap up the code in whatever function or class and you are ready to give it a shot for real

This sounds like more work, but it is super easy to execute code in the interpreter that you have in your editor (select code in script window, ALT + Shift + E to execute in interpreter)

Now the thing people might say is - Well, it is hard to always setup stuff with toy data, and that's true. In that case, you just set a debugger at the point where you would be writing your new function/method, and when you pause there, launch the interactive python interpretter within the debugger and you can start prototyping code from scratch in exactly the same way above, but in the debugger, with actual data you care about.

I find that you eliminate all the dumb/idiotic bugs in code this way and the only ones that I need to actually debug at times are certain edge cases I did not account for at the time of prototyping.