It seems like a flavour of the rubber duck method; by trying to explain it to a third party, you think about it in a different way and find a solution.

Maybe the real artificial intelligence is the regular intelligence we found along the way.

More specifically:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/

Rubber Duck debugging.

To be fair, I've written countless stack overflow posts detailing my problems in hope someone would be able to spot the mistake or error only for me to realize what it was along the way and never even submitting it.

And I didn't even need a 🦆 for it

99% of the questions I was going to post to stack overflow were solved before I hit post. Something about really having to think through your problem to give people the most complete information about your problem as possible makes it easier to find the solution.

I did just get a rubber ducky and I didn't know what I should do with it till now.

i wanted to try this, but i only got a hard plastic duck

That's like how I cheated through every single test in school I've ever taken. I literally just paid attention to what the teacher said, wrote the answers down, wrote down more answers from the book, and then read them a couple times until I remembered them. I'd come in and just write down all those answers on the test and they'd never suspect a thing. I've still never been caught to this day and I even use it in my life outside of school.

Back in the days of usenet if I had a Linux problem I would carefully research the issue while composing a post asking how to solve it. I needed to make sure I covered every possible option so that people would know just how odd the problem was and that I had taken every reasonable step to fix it. And this was how I hardly ever had to post anything because this process almost always found the answer.

In programming we use a rubber ducky for this

Yea I sometimes use LLM chatbots as a rubber duck.

A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.

Charles Kettering

Charles Franklin Kettering (August 29, 1876 – November 25, 1958) sometimes known as Charles Fredrick Kettering[1] was an American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 186 patents.[2] He was a founder of Delco, and was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947. Among his most widely used automotive developments were the electrical starting motor[3] and leaded gasoline.[4] In association with the DuPont Chemical Company, he was also responsible for the invention of Freon refrigerant for refrigeration and air conditioning systems. At DuPont he also was responsible for the development of Duco lacquers and enamels, the first practical colored paints for mass-produced automobiles. While working with the Dayton-Wright Company he developed the "Bug" aerial torpedo, considered the world's first aerial missile.[5] He led the advancement of practical, lightweight two-stroke diesel engines, revolutionizing the locomotive and heavy equipment industries. In 1927, he founded the Kettering Foundation, a non-partisan research foundation, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in January 1933.

Is anyone who uses AI just an "AI folk" now?

"Correct question is half of answer"

I can't count the number of times I've written out a question for a coworker, answered it myself in the process of phrasing the question and deleted it all. My mentoree has a habit of sending me messages and deleting them a couple seconds later which I'm pretty sure is the same thing.

People can hate ai all they want but if bouncing questions off an ai helps debug a problem go for it.

What a feature. Blueskyians really don’t like birdsite.

Also, hope somebody finds this comment (& Lemmy) via web search

Possible Twitter screenshot

Ineresting, will make a good topic for my next offline podcast (talking to my friends without a microphone).

What tech support department doesn't have the "ask the stuffed bear on the counter in the corner out loud your question before asking tech support" system in place ?

Am I the only one that sees all of these AI platforms as just the next iteration of search engines?

They have bumbled backwards into a new flavor of rubber duck debugging. Considering the likelihood of a rubber duck bullshitting you, I know which I'll be interrogating.