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.
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.
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 happens so often with my wife that she’s started saying “quack” when I figure it out
Real thing by the way. Works not only with programming.
Works with writing fiction, too. I read the section aloud and explain the reasoning behind the choices, and that helps me figure out what isn’t quite working. Also, reading aloud makes awkward dialog stand out more so than reading silently.
came to say this and in addition its more effective with an actual person even if they don’t say anything. Even a small amount of feedback helps that much more although ironically though it kinda palteus if it stops you from jumping on your new ideas and getting them down.
I call one of my coworkers once a week with “Can I rubber duck you?” which means I’m just going to talk about my problem and explain my thought process in hopes she spots an obvious solution.
We do it to each other and 30% of the time the other dev says “why not just X” and we agree that it’s pretty obvious.
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?
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.
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.
You’re not wrong. At work I have the bizarre situation that I have a laptop which is pretty powerful but I’m not allowed to develop on it and have no admin rights on it so I have to remote desktop into a less powerful VDI running in a different country with exactly the same access to company information but I have local admin rights on that machine. Also development is super cumbersome because it’s a windows VDI so I have to use WSL2 for a lot of the things I’m doing. Really weird, inefficient and expensive.
Same, my work laptop is locked down hard but I have admin access to some production servers.
I guess it comes down to they trust me, but they don’t trust the networks around me.
Obviously then you’d trust everything it says and fire half your staff to replace them with a row of ducks
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 :)
Yeah, but it always tells me my ideas are good and he is wrong. So there is that
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.
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.
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…
Oh I know a place that is/was like this but with tiny (or not so tiny) T-Rex figures due to naming things.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I keep one on my desk just for this reference :)
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?
Also going for a walk, driving, or the other morning I woke up spontaneously about 2 hours early and come up with a solution.
Prolonged and energetic walks jolt my brain so well that I have a standing task of maybe finding a way of recording audio clips right from the lock screen of my phone. Unfortunately, I know for certain that this will result in a pile of said clips collecting on the phone, as sorting them into notes isn’t a priority once I’m back home.
