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@mcc and it teaches programmers to think through, structure, and design their code better, rather than use generated code they don’t understand.

This is a product I’d actually use.

@mcc And it "fixes bugs" in the same sense that Copilot "writes code"

meaning that it gets humans to do all the work but convinces other humans that no human work was involved

@mcc But I already have a plushie for that.

I call it Bear Programming….

@mcc
db

@mcc Amusing idea.

@mcc honestly this sounds good unironically, you could even generate comments on from the rubber duck explanations

@mcc Yep, had this thought too. It would also be really useful when dealing with on-call incidents. It's a high-stress situation where prompts like "What actual observations are you working from right now?" and "Can you think of any other way you could get the same indications?" would be really useful.

@mcc here you go: https://rubberduckdebugging.com/cyberduck/

@mcc

This is actually what most people need

@mcc

This would be incredibly useful.

@mcc A code learning program that engages with elenchus (asking questions) about the users code, seeking explanations not just for reason but for choice, would be an earthquake in the flipped teaching. It is literally the inverted cousin of the testing system that overlords today. Thinks = student writes code and program asks 3 random questions the student must explain. Call the program “little brother.”

@mcc I'm not following, could you explain how you think this would work in a bit more detail?

@mcc if it made nice looking comments of the conversation, it'd be legendary for documentation

@mcc That's a great idea. I was thinking of something that would refer you to the relevant section in the docs, because my biggest fear around this stuff is that we are distancing people even further from reading docs and we all know they don't need any more help with that.

@mcc
Rubber ducky, you're the one!
You make coding time so much fun!

@mcc where can I subscribe?

@mcc Patent it!

@mcc how about the Thanksgiving Family code assistant which sarcastically points out your bugs to you and inaccurately describes what your program tries to accomplish in light of your errors.
"So I see you're writing a tool that sends users' data to Russia with stack overflow vulnerabilities? You could've skipped all the GUI work and gotten the same result with fpaste."
#sarcasm #family #haha #programming

@mcc Still waiting for the seminal “AI Considered Harmful” article

@mcc Sprinkled randomly with "don't you think this code could be deleted?"

@mcc https://mastodon.social/@hyc/109455112129583944

@mcc

@mcc I assume your phone is blowing up with lunch invites from VCs.

@mcc slap a beard on it and call it Number One.

(Although now I'm wondering what strange new circumstances would have to arise for Una to wear a riker beard ...)

@mcc if i wasn't sure devs would hate and ignore it, I'd call it genius

@mcc haha, I recently considered writing exactly that: A rubber duck tool, 100% LLM free.

@mcc Call it ELI5-a

@mcc "how does for ((i=0; i<=${#wombles[@]}; i+=3)); do make you feel?"