This is definitely one of the most powerful debugging techniques for hard problems in my toolkit, though I phrase it as "If I wanted to produce this problem on purpose, how would I go about doing it?", since that is a general debugging technique and their phrasing is specific to communicating actors.
This results in me exclaiming every 4-6 months or so that I wouldn't know how to create this particular bug on purpose if I wanted to, which I suppose doesn't make much sense as a complaint about a bug until you start thinking this way. Anyhow, it isn't perfect and you will sometimes be defeated by the sheer perversity of bugs and their behavior. (I also find these are the tiny ones, like OR instead of XOR or something equally simple and at times even one-character, that produce mind-blowing behavior off that one error. The architectural bugs tend to give way to this analysis much more readily.) But it's a useful tool much of the time.
This results in me exclaiming every 4-6 months or so that I wouldn't know how to create this particular bug on purpose if I wanted to, which I suppose doesn't make much sense as a complaint about a bug until you start thinking this way. Anyhow, it isn't perfect and you will sometimes be defeated by the sheer perversity of bugs and their behavior. (I also find these are the tiny ones, like OR instead of XOR or something equally simple and at times even one-character, that produce mind-blowing behavior off that one error. The architectural bugs tend to give way to this analysis much more readily.) But it's a useful tool much of the time.