Just spent $15 on a rubber duck debugger and it actually helped

I grabbed one of those little rubber ducks off Amazon after reading about rubber duck debugging in a forum post, thinking it was silly but worth a shot. Stuck explaining my broken loop to the duck for 10 minutes and spotted the off-by-one error right when I said "index starts at 0" out loud. Anybody else have a weird tool that ended up saving their code?

2 comments

2 Comments

margaret_singh11mo ago

That's awesome, talking through the problem out loud really does force you to see the mistake...

lewis.drew1mo ago

Funny how that works, right? I've caught myself talking through a problem and suddenly realizing where I went off track. It's like your own voice tricks you into seeing the obvious thing you were missing. Something about saying it out loud just makes the mistake stand out... almost embarrassing sometimes how simple it was. I've started doing it more often when I get stuck, even if people around me give me weird looks. Feels like a cheat code for the brain.