6 ms·
I don't see how Claude helped the debugging at all. It seemed like the author knew what to do and it was more telling Claude to think about that. I've used Cla
by flumpcakes 9mo ago
I don't see how Claude helped the debugging at all. It seemed like the author knew what to do and it was more telling Claude to think about that.
I've used Claude a bit and it never speaks to me like that either, "Holy Cow!" etc. It sounds more annoying than interacting with real people. Perhaps AIs are good at sensing personalities from input text and doesn't act this way with my terse prompts..
- AceJohnny2 9mo agoEven if the chatbot served only as a Rubber Ducky [1], that's already valuable. I've used Claude for debugging system behavior, and I kind of agree with the author. While Claude isn't always directly helpful (hallucinations remain, or at least outdated information), it helps me 1) spell out my understanding of the system (see [1]) and 2) help me keep momentum by supplying tasks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
- NewJazz 9mo agoA rubber ducky demands that you think about your own questions, rather than taking a mental back seat as you get pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant.
- supern0va 9mo agoI assure you that if you rubber duck at another engineer that doesn't understand what you're doing, you will also be pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant. ;)
- stephenr 9mo agoThat isn't rubber duck debugging. It's just talking to someone about the problem. The entire point of rubber duck debugging is that the other side literally cannot respond - it's an inanimate object, or even a literal duck/animal.
- quesera 9mo agoOh it can definitely be a person. I've worked with a few!
- stephenr 9mo agoCue obligatory Ralph Fiennes "You're an inanimate fucking object".
- fc417fc802 9mo agoI don't think that's right. When you explain a technical problem to someone who isn't intimately familiar with it you're forced to think through the individual steps in quite a bit of detail. Of course that itself is an acquired skill but never mind that. The point or rubber duck debugging then is to realize the benefit of verbally describing the problem without needing to interrupt your colleague and waste his time in order to do so. It's born of the recognition that often, midway through wasting your colleague's time, you'll trail off with an "oh ..." and exit the conversation. You've ended up figuring out the problem before ever actually receiving any feedback. To that end an LLM works perfectly well as long as you still need to walk through a full explanation of the problem (ie minimal relevant context). An added bonus being that the LLM offers at least some of the benefits of a live person who can point out errors or alert you to new information as you go. Basically my quibble is that to me the entire point of rubber duck debugging is "doesn't waste a real person's time" but it comes with the noticeable drawback of "plastic duck is incapable of contributing any useful insights".
- NewJazz 9mo agoTo that end a notepad works just as well.
- fc417fc802 9mo agoIn reality vim is my usual approach. But I think LLMs are better in a lot of regards.
- 9mo ago
- MBCook 9mo agoThey also don’t waste electricity, water, drive up the prices of critical computer components, or DDOS websites to steal their content.
- AceJohnny2 9mo agoNot to defend the extravagant power use of the AI datacenters, but I invite you to look up the ecological footprint of a human being.
- MBCook 9mo agoThe human being in this scenario exists either way. The AI does not.
- grimgrin 9mo agoI'm not saying you should do this, but you can do this: https://gist.github.com/shmup/100a7529724cedfcda1276a65664dcbe https://gist.github.com/shmup/100a7529724cedfcda1276a65664dc...
- NewJazz 9mo agoLol not bad
- fc417fc802 9mo agoAmusingly that looks less like "rubber duck debugging" and more like "socratic questions". Which certainly isn't a bad thing.
- grimgrin 9mo agoThat is so true I wanted to "fix it", granted, I'm not even using these at the moment, but I appreciated the idea https://github.com/shmup/metacog-skills/ https://github.com/shmup/metacog-skills/
- specialist 9mo agoRubber Ducky is a terrific name for a GPT. Also, always reminds me of Kermit singing "...you make bath time so much fun!..."
- saghm 9mo agoMaybe Kermit has sung it at some point, but that's Ernie's song usually
- specialist 9mo agoHa. Well spotted. I totally hallucinated that.
- nurettin 9mo agoMaybe it was this one https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Do_De_Rubber_Duck https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Do_De_Rubber_Duck
- dspillett 9mo ago> Even if the chatbot served only as a Rubber Ducky [1], that's already valuable. I use the Other Voices for that. I can't entirely turn them off, I might as well make use of them!
- H8crilA 9mo agoAIs are exceptional at sensing personalities from text. Claude nailed it here, the author felt so good about the "holy cow" comments that he even included them in the blog post. I'm not just poking this, but saying that the bots are fantastic sycophants.
- IshKebab 9mo agoNo they aren't. Current LLMs always have that annoying over-eager tone. The comment about Claude being pumped was a joke.
- stackghost 9mo agoChatGPT set to "terse and professional" personality mode is refreshingly sparse on the "you're absolutely right" bullshit
- simondotau 9mo agoIt depends how much the LLM has been beaten into submission by the system prompt.
- bitwize 9mo agoIt's like I keep saying, it probably wasn't a good idea to give our development tools Genuine People Personalities...
- eieio 9mo agoClaude is much faster at extracting fields from a pcap and processing them with awk than I am!
- catlifeonmars 9mo agoHave you tried wireshark?
- dcdc123 9mo agoYou’re absolutely right!
- nerdsniper 9mo agoI think the blog post itself was partially written with LLMs, which explains some of the odd narrative style.