[LatencyKills]

I realize my situation isn’t typical, but I’m retired and have dealt with depression most of my life.

The thing I miss most about work (yes, you really can miss work) is collaborative problem-solving. At Microsoft, we called it “teddy bear debugging”—basically, self-explaining a problem out loud to clarify your thinking. [1]

These days, when I’m stuck, I open Claude Code and “talk it through.” That back-and-forth helps me reason through technical issues and scratches a bit of that collaborative itch that helped keep my depression in check.

[1]: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/w...

[tclancy]

I've found something similar. I've been using Claude Code to build lots of things I would but fear failing at or hitting an iceberg. Having seen success for that, I've started rubber ducking it through a number of things. Changed the carburetor on my snow blower for the first time ever and with minimal pain mainly because "asking Claude about it" meant making myself stop and think through the process, plan an approach and put together a mise-en-place rather than starting, realizing I needed a couple of tools, leaving things a mess and not coming back due to anxiety.

Basically, it helps me avoid what they called "gumption traps" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

[byproxy]

Yep, this, so far, proven the most promising use of LLMs, to me. I've read about people's Rube Goldberg machine-eqsue setups for getting agentic LLMs to work for them, but I find simply having a dialectic with an LLM to be more fruitful. Rubber-ducking with a duck that quacks back.

[magicpin]

How do you prevent it from just taking the reins and writing an entire function or class for you when all you wanted to do was just talk about the code you already had.

[righthand]

But talking with an Llm isn’t teddy bear/rubber duck debugging because your llm has some high odds of outputting good feedback. Teddy bear/rubber duck debugging involves the other party not knowing anything about your problem let a lone even capable of giving a response (hence why it’s not go-ask-a-coworker/teacher/professional debugging). It’s about getting yourself to refocus the problem and state what you already know and allowing your brain to organize the facts.

I’m not trying to be rude but it seems like you’re conflating collaborative problem solving with rubber duck debugging. You haven’t actually collaborated with a rubber duck when you’re finished rubber duck debugging.

[LatencyKills]

> But talking with an Llm isn’t teddy bear/rubber duck debugging because your llm has some high odds of outputting good feedback.

That isn't how we did it at either Microsoft or Apple. There, we defined it as walking another engineer through a problem. That person may or may not have been an expert in whatever I was working on at the time. You truly aren't suggesting that rubber duck debugging only works when you don't receive feedback?

I use Claude to bounce ideas around just like I did with my human teammates.

I think you're being pedantic, but it doesn't matter to me: in the end, I work must better when I can talk through a problem; Claude is a good stand-in when I don't have access to another human.

[nottorp]

> involves the other party not knowing anything about your problem let a lone even capable of giving a response

I prefer grabbing a colleague that is technical but does not work on this particular project. Seems to force me to organize the info in my head more than an actual rubber duck.

[salawat]

Rubber duck debugging is a null-llm offloading to your gray matter for the other half of interlocution. A fancy way of recruiting your other brain matter into the problem solving process. Perhaps by offloading to a non-null LLM, there is decreased activation/recruitment of brain regions in the problem solving process, leading to network pruning over time. Particularly in the event you take the position that the "tool" isn't something worthy of having it's inner state reacted to and modeled via mirror networks.

But what do I know man, I'm just a duck on the Internet. On the Internet, no one knows you're a duck.

Quack.

[poszlem]

Or "rubberducking" as it's called now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging