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.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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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...
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.
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.
it is the process of explaining how your code works (or should work) to someone that you realizes the errors or solution.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, but it always tells me my ideas are good and he is wrong. So there is that
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.
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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.
True for everything I think.
If rubber ducks are a sign of bugs, then I do not want a Jeep.
This happens so often with my wife that she’s started saying “quack” when I figure it out
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 so I never even posted the half-written posts 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? I thought this was just how it works. It’s why we think out loud.
eta: thinking + speaking + hearing engages more of your brain. That’s obvious, right? More engagement == more connections?
My wife is my rubber duck. She doesn’t mind when I explain the most jargon-heavy stuff to her.
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.
Every single popcorn flick from the 80s and 90s has a main character make a big plot-resolving realization while doing early act 3 exposition
If this is such a universal human experience that we wrote it into movies made for general audiences, I think that programmers are not the only ones debugging to their ducks
I keep one on my desk just for this reference :)
I have a few Lego kits my kids have gotten me, and a small toy penguin, which I talk through things with.
Thankfully it looks like I'm just on camera. Though I work from home so it doesnt really matter.
I also treat several coworkers like my rubber ducky. I warn them first though, so I feel like its not as bad.
Do you squeeze them until they squeak?
... Actually one of my coworkers did squeak like one. She figured out why I called about 5 seconds in and just went "squeak", which made me burst out laughing, and honestly it just got my brain where it needed to be even quicker
I do this to my main analyst as a last resort; have since day 1.
"Sorry, I gotta rant this one out." Knowing full-well they have nfi what I'm going on about.
Then eventually, that feeling of a clarity bomb going off followed by a period of dopamine fallout.
The Feynman method
thanks did not know this :)
Not quite the same, but sometimes when I’m doing a task I like to talk through what I’m doing out loud as if I was showing someone else how to do it.
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