So, what is it that iopipe really brings to the table here?

I’m not seeing anything about what iopipe is providing, just that it was somehow magically used to discover the problem with a recursive function.

Good question. I definitely should go into more detail as to what IOpipe is doing under the hood. But to answer your question, IOpipe is an agent that wraps your lambda handler and gathers metrics about it. In this article, I use the ProfilerPlugin, which additionally wraps the function with Python's cProfile profiler. The profile I download from the IOpipe dashboard comes directly from cProfile. Will revise the article to go into more detail, thanks for the feedback.