Ah thanks - I couldn't remember the original version.
For reference: it's called Kernighan's Law, and can be found in the Second Edition of "The Elements of Programming Style", page 10 [1].
The original phrasing is:
> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
[1] https://archive.org/details/the-elements-of-programming-styl...
It seems I was not able to either, and I trusted google AI snippet. Thanks