Rubber Duck Debugging with ChatGPT: A Developer's New Best Friend?

As a developer, you've probably heard of the term "rubber duck debugging" or "rubber ducking." The term comes from the book "The Pragmatic Programmer," and it refers to the practice of explaining your code to someone (or something) else in order to better understand the problem. It's a simple yet effective technique that can help you solve problems and improve your problem-solving skills.

However, as a new developer working in startups, I found it difficult to find a senior developer with the time to help me debug more complex or subtle issues. That's where rubber-duck debugging can be of great help.

The disadvantage of the rubber duck is that it doesn't talk back. It can't provide feedback or suggestions on how to solve the problem. But there is a rubber duck that can talk back… ChatGPT!

If you're not familiar with ChatGPT, it's a large language model developed by OpenAI. It can be used for many natural language processing tasks, such as translations, text summarization, and question answering. It’s essentially a very smart chatbot, and it’s currently the closest thing we have right now (publicly available, at least) to general-purpose artificial intelligence.

I've been using ChatGPT as a rubber duck for debugging, and I've found a prompt that has been working great so far for that:

"I want you to act as a senior web developer with over 20 years of experience. I will tell you about the project I'm working on and tell you about bugs I'm running into, and I want you to help me solve those bugs by giving me possible explanations for what those bugs might be happening, giving me code examples when necessary. My project is [here I describe a bit of the project and the stack/libraries I’m using]. The first issue I'm running into is [here I explain the issue].”

By using this prompt, I've been able to debug issues and understand some aspects of development that I wasn't very familiar with, like some aspects of networking and DNS that were causing an issue in a project I was recently working on.

Sometimes, like with the rubber duck, explaining the problem out loud can help me find the issue without having to actually even submit the prompt to ChatGPT. Other times, however, ChatGPT’s answers have been extremely helpful in figuring out what the problem was.

I encourage you to try using ChatGPT as a rubber duck for debugging and see how it can help you. Let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear about your experience with it and if you’ve found better prompts or use cases for this awesome tool.

In conclusion, rubber duck debugging is a powerful technique that can help you solve problems and improve your problem-solving skills. The disadvantage of the rubber duck is that it doesn't talk back, but using ChatGPT as a rubber duck can be a great help. It can provide feedback, suggestions, and examples that can help you understand the problem better and solve it faster. Give it a try and see how it can help you in your development process.