Programmers often discover solutions while explaining a problem to someone else, even to people with no programming knowledge. Describing the code, and comparing to what it actually does, exposes inconsistencies. Explaining a subject also forces the programmer to look at it from new perspectives and can provide a deeper understanding.
Not a programmer but at my last job I couldnt count how many times I would walk into our engineers office and start explaining a problem only to stop mid sentence and say “wait, I’m an idiot” then walk back out. Sometimes talking about it is all you need to make the pieces fit.
I used to teach design. Before a presentation, I always asked my student to explain their project to someone with no knowledge on the subject, like their grandmother or so. Mainly to discover the logic flaws in their presentation.
It’s all fun and games until the duck talks back.
This is why I put rubber ducks at all desks of my it colleagues. It helps.
It might have escalated a bit after that though. There are hundreds of rubber duckies all around the office now…
A corollary to this is that it’s often very difficult to explain what’s wrong because if you could explain it clearly, you would probably be fixing it already.
While I havent explained my code to a rubber duck I did find The solution to my Problem just because I started to write it down in order to get help in a forum.
If rubber ducks are a sign of bugs, then I do not want a Jeep.
Now, hear me out: what if the rubber duck burned tons of energy, poisoned the water and air, caused a global shortage of computer parts, was built with material without the permission of creators, made it easy to make nonconsensual sexual images of people, and lied to you?
Yeah, but it always tells me my ideas are good and he is wrong. So there is that
You forgot:
- exploit and traumatize developing country workers to filter nsfw/nsfl. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
- atrophied the skills of people who use it. https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills
exploit and traumatize developing country workers to filter nsfw/nsfl
I’ve always felt like there’s a place in there for the early internet users through millenials (and maybe some early Gen Z) who spent a lot of time getting tricked by places like 4chan to see nsfl stuff and developed a tolerance to that sort of crap.
I’m sure there are a lot of people that already gave up on humanity years ago and have the psychological damage/callouses to deal with that more than a random selection of a population that hasn’t been affected yet. Let the already damaged use that ability, like a super power, to save those who haven’t experienced enough to the point where they’ve given up yet.
I don’t think they care as much for minimizing trauma as they care for cheap labor from a developing country. I doubt there are a lot of 4chan users there.
You can fix the world by putting an AI into the rubber duck without electricity and expensive parts and it still works!
AI enhanced by that smile and those eyes and quiet posture helps solve problems :)
It’s a moron detector.
Most of us would avoid it like the plague, but morons will let it write their code in the first place.
Amen.
But this rubber duck knows about programming. However, especially early on the duck lied a lot and now often insists that the API version it learned a year ago is still the latest and everything you’ve done with the new one is wrong. Well, now you l can let it read the new documentation beforehand but it’s still a weird rubber duck.
Hey! It’s someone with actual development experience.
I hope NPU hardware like CIX Clawcore will become more common for Developers. They can run 30B models locally and these smaller models are getting better and more efficient as well (MoE etc).
The hardware still burns energy and resources and costs money but locally so you are responsible for it and don’t externalize everything into some data centers and investor / public money.
You can run a 30B model on a used 3090.
I admire your optimism.
You know what hardware is going to become common with developers? Dumb terminal tablets and cloud accounts, unless we stop the capitalists right away.
this is one reason I type questions out before asking them
the number of times I found the error, while describing the error on stackoverflow …
Is always funny when you wrote 3 paragraphs just to discard them all because you found the error while typing.
This happens so often with my wife that she’s started saying “quack” when I figure it out
True for everything I think.
Isn’t that just brainstorming?
No. Brainstorming is when you’re with a group and everyone is throwing out ideas unfiltered.
Rubber duck debugging is when you are trying to solve an issue by describing your problem to another person (or a rubber duck) and through the act of describing the problem you gain a better understanding of the issue and often this causes you to get a ‘eureka moment’ where the solution is suddenly clear to you.
I’d say brainstorming is what you do before writing code and rubber ducking is what you do to debug code that you’ve already written.
They also work kinda differently. Brainstorming an idea is different from explaining it out loud, detail by detail.
works even for non programming stuff. its letting our brain process the information in order ans organising it
I write a lot of notes, because I can’t trust myself to remember details of any project after a day or more of hopping through multiple other tasks and online information onslaught. This particularly concerns any problems on which I get stuck — and whaddayaknow, writing out what specifically doesn’t work and how it should work, helps with realizing why it might not work.
Yeah. I’m no programmer but I’ve had it often that I couldn’t find a solution for a problem myself, said ‘fuck it, I’ll have to ask the internet’, and by writing out what my problem was I figured out the solution lol
I used to tutor college chemistry and calculus. I secretly sucked at both, but I knew what questions to ask students to start them thinking. They got excited to discover the answers while explaining it to me.
This has a name?
The Feynman method is another name for it. Thanks to PennyRoyal@sh.itjust.works for this info.
