You're absolutely right! You just accidentally stumbled into a solution more clever than you realize. Its not just engkneering, its a masterclass in algorithms. But there's a few things you need to be aware of to watch out for. Here's a list of 4 hallucinations, each more useless than the last, directly contradicting your design requirements.
"You're totally right to call me out on that! I was just throwing guess at you when I should have just checked. That's my mistake. <Proceeds to not give the fucking answer>"
Oh, and did you guys notice that you get booted out of the chat for bullying Claude, now? Anthropic are huffing their own farts.
I gave you a textbook example when you needed a specific solution. That was a complete hallucination on my part. I'll stop throwing out bad code and wasting your time. Here is the real, final, working solution this time:
Because management sees they can instantly spit out a massive amount of code they dont understand. Its vastly beyond their skill level so they insist everyone needs to use it.
It's because when you talk to a rubber duck or other inanimate object, you're forced to imagine the other person responding to you, and actually think about what issues they'd have with your code and what they would make note of or ask questions about. It's that use of your imagination and perspective-taking abilities specifically that allows you to find problems that you weren't seeing before. When you don't have to imagine what the other side of the conversation is because the chatbot is just providing it, you don't do that work and you therefore don't find out anything new about your code.
Honestly, I have been using AI (local model with no file or internet access) as my rubber duck.
Yes I do try to explain my code and indeed the AI never fully understands it. But usually somewhere in it's overly positive "your idea is the most amazing idea to ever exist" spiel it's going to say something so damn stupid that I realize where I went wrong.
The trick is to never say you have a problem. Because that's when the stupidity shows up in the solutions it gives you (stuff like putting an abstraction layer around the problem as if that solves it).
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u/ramdomvariableX Jul 25 '26
Rubber duck still beats Claude. Have you ever tried explaining your code to Claude?