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Comment by wouldbecouldbe | Hacker News Reader

It's more that the balance in usefulness vs waste of time shifts into the other direction after a few times spending long time getting it right and just doing it yourself anyway.

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I've spent 20 years explaining my code to a rubber duck and getting great use out of that duck. No one will ever convince me that it's less useful now when the duck actually has read the Internet and has useful suggestions and ideas back to share. Even if it makes shit up on an occasion.

I don't know. The value of rubber-ducking is that you have to break the problem down into very simple terms to explain it. It's the explaining it part that is magic. That value goes away (or is greatly diminished) if the rubber duck responds with anything other than a request for further explanation.

You have to break down a problem to GPT just like you would to a human, and if it misunderstands you or asks you, you'd have to elaborate just the same. It's modeled after us, after all. The rubber duck is a stand-in for a human. GPT also is. But just a vastly better one.

Of course.

The part I was responding to was this:

> when the duck actually has read the Internet and has useful suggestions and ideas back to share

I think that if it does that, it's legitimately less useful as a rubber duck. I'm not saying it isn't useful -- it's just not useful as a rubber duck anymore.

Similarly, but not quite, I often find browsing new submits on HN more useful than simply going through the front page. Just because, uh, front page is decided by statistics, that is, the community's neurotypicals

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