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Comment by supern0va

1 day ago

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. ;)

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supern0va

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stephenr  1 day ago

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.

  • fc417fc802  10 hours ago

    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".

    • dspillett  7 hours ago

      > 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.

      The point of Rubber Ducking (or talking/praying to the Wooden Indian, to use an older phrase that is steeped in somewhat racist undertones so no longer generally used) is that it is an inanimate object that doesn't talk back. You still talk to it as if you were explaining to another person, so are forcing yourself to get your thoughts in order in a way that would make that possible, but actually talking to another person who is actively listening and actually asking questions is the next level.

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