8 ms·
I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the
by monkaiju 7mo ago
I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the developer explaining what their doing to themselves. Not to another person, and not to a thing pretending to be a person. If you have a "two way" or "conversational" debugging/designing experience it isnt rubber ducking, its just normal design/debugging.
The moment I bring in a conversational element, I want a being that actually has problem comprehension and creativity which an LLM by definition does not.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dexwiz 7mo agoSometimes people just need something else to tell them their ideas are valid. Validation is a core principle of therapeutic care. Procrastination is tightly linked to fear of a negative outcome. LLMs can help with both of these. They can validate ideas in the now which can help overcome some of that anxiety. Unfortunately they can also validate some really bad ideas.
- satvikpendem 7mo agoSometimes I don't want creativity though, I'm just not familiar enough with the solution space and I use the LLM as a sort of gradient descent simulator to the right solution to my problem (the LLM which itself used gradient descent when trained, meta, I know). I am not looking for wholly new solutions, just one that fits the problem the best, just as one could Google that information but LLMs save even that searching time.
- bandrami 6mo ago> I'm just not familiar enough with the solution space Neither is the LLM
- satvikpendem 6mo agoOftentimes it is though, good enough for my purposes.
- bandrami 6mo agoIf you're not familiar with the problem space, by definition you don't know whether or not that's the case. The problem spaces I do know well, I know the LLM isn't good at it, so why would I assume it's better at spaces I don't know?
- satvikpendem 6mo agoI said familiar enough, not familiar. For example, let's say I'm building an app I know needs caching, the LLM is very good at telling me what types of caching to use, what libraries to use for each type, and so on, for which I can do more research if I really want to know specifically what the best library out of all the rest are, but oftentimes its top suggestion is, like I said, good enough for my purpose of e.g. caching.
- bandrami 6mo agoI still don't get what you're saying. If you possess enough information to accurately judge the LLM's suggestions you possess enough information to decide on your own. There's not really a way around that.
- satvikpendem 6mo agoOf course I'm deciding on my own, I'm not letting the LLM decide for me (although some people do). But the point is whatever the suggestion is is merely an implementation detail that either solves my problem or not, not sure what part of that is confusing. Replace LLM with glorified Google and maybe it's less confusing.
- bandrami 6mo ago
- jrowen 6mo agoI feel I've had the most success with treating it like another developer. One that has specific strengths (reference/checklists/scanning) and weaknesses (big picture/creativity). But definitely bouncing actual questions that I would say to a person off it.
- Waterluvian 6mo agoMaybe it’s just a semantic distinction, which, sure. I guess I’d just call it research? It’s basically the “I’m reading blogs, repos, issue trackers, api docs etc. to get a feel for the problem space” step of meaningful engineering. But I definitely reach for a clear and concise way to describe that my brain and fingers are a firewall between the LLM and my code/workspace. I’m using it to help frame my thinking but I’m the one making the decisions. And I’m intentionally keeping context in my brain, not the LLM, by not exposing my workspace to it.
- WCSTombs 6mo agoAbsolutely, the whole point of the rubber duck is that it's inanimate. The act of talking to the rubber duck makes you first of all describe your problem in words, and secondly hear (or read) it back and reprocess it in a slightly different way. It's a completely free way to use more parts of your brain when you need to. LLMs are a non-free way for you to make use of less of your brain. It seems to me that these are not the same thing.
- __mharrison__ 6mo agoMy understanding was that rubber ducking was using a different portion of your brain by speaking the words. The same discovery often happens when you explain a problem to a coworker and midway through the explanation you say "nvm, I know what I did wrong"