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75% of what AI does can be achieved with a magic 8 ball, rubber duck, Wikipedia, and a good notes app
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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The GitHub repo and Wikipedia articles/sources will show you just fine. The 8-ball just determines which words it uses to summarize.
And the duck? I'm at a bit of loss on the functionality of the duck . . .or . . just because we all need a rubber duck???
The duck can be anything really, it's the explaining out loud your issue that helps find what you're missing. It's a popular programming technique
Yeah Rubber Ducking, OKA Rubber Duck Debugging. You are working on a program, say a store front end, and you are having issues and you don't know why. You get someone else, they don't even have to be a programmer but it helps, and then you explain briefly and clearly, step by step what you are trying to do, and most of the time the issue will become clear and if not the other person can point out something you are missing because you are too close to the code and you also know what you want to put into it, but that doesn't mean you put it in, and you just think you did.
The name comes from a guy who used to carry around a large rubber duck for when he couldn't get people to explain it to, and he would explain it to the duck. Allot of programmers use dolls and teddy bears instead of ducks. Back when I was programming I did it to the game box of H2G2TG. I didn't learn what it was called until 6 years later from a fellow programmer in collage (IIRC) but it was the same thing.
I read through all the comments hoping someone would explain the rubber duck part. Your comment’s at the bottom of the page, and yet it’s the first one I’ve seen to question it.
Does anyone know what the rubber duck is supposed to add? Inquiring minds want to know!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
The joke is that "talking to a rubber duck" is probably just as effective as talking to a chatbot
It's about talking to something (anything, but a rubber duck is common) outloud just to voice your questions and talk through things.
Effectively, you're just conversing with yourself.
Actually no. It can be that but the idea is that you should talk to someone who isn't involved with what you are doing and one of two things happen, you have a lightbulb moment like you are talking about which you can be talking with the wall at that point, or the person you are talking to is supposed to see the blatantly obvious thing you are missing and then they tell you about it. It is called Rubber Ducking because one of the guys carried around a rubber duck when developing stuff and he couldn't easily get another person to stand there and listen to him whinge on about what he was doing. It is still better to have a thinking person there but you can't always have what you want.
The duck is used for it'scorkscrew penis, you don't want to know.