Comment by NewJazz
19 hours ago
A rubber ducky demands that you think about your own questions, rather than taking a mental back seat as you get pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant.
19 hours ago
A rubber ducky demands that you think about your own questions, rather than taking a mental back seat as you get pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant.
I assure you that if you rubber duck at another engineer that doesn't understand what you're doing, you will also be pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant. ;)
That isn't rubber duck debugging. It's just talking to someone about the problem.
The entire point of rubber duck debugging is that the other side literally cannot respond - it's an inanimate object, or even a literal duck/animal.
I don't think that's right. When you explain a technical problem to someone who isn't intimately familiar with it you're forced to think through the individual steps in quite a bit of detail. Of course that itself is an acquired skill but never mind that.
The point or rubber duck debugging then is to realize the benefit of verbally describing the problem without needing to interrupt your colleague and waste his time in order to do so. It's born of the recognition that often, midway through wasting your colleague's time, you'll trail off with an "oh ..." and exit the conversation. You've ended up figuring out the problem before ever actually receiving any feedback.
To that end an LLM works perfectly well as long as you still need to walk through a full explanation of the problem (ie minimal relevant context). An added bonus being that the LLM offers at least some of the benefits of a live person who can point out errors or alert you to new information as you go.
Basically my quibble is that to me the entire point of rubber duck debugging is "doesn't waste a real person's time" but it comes with the noticeable drawback of "plastic duck is incapable of contributing any useful insights".
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Oh it can definitely be a person. I've worked with a few!
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I'm not saying you should do this, but you can do this:
https://gist.github.com/shmup/100a7529724cedfcda1276a65664dc...
Amusingly that looks less like "rubber duck debugging" and more like "socratic questions". Which certainly isn't a bad thing.
That is so true I wanted to "fix it", granted, I'm not even using these at the moment, but I appreciated the idea
https://github.com/shmup/metacog-skills/
Lol not bad
They also don’t waste electricity, water, drive up the prices of critical computer components, or DDOS websites to steal their content.
Not to defend the extravagant power use of the AI datacenters, but I invite you to look up the ecological footprint of a human being.
The human being in this scenario exists either way.
The AI does not.