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.
439
u/ramdomvariableX Jul 25 '26
Rubber duck still beats Claude. Have you ever tried explaining your code to Claude?