RubberDuckGPT – An AI that forces you to think (rubber-duck-gpt.com)

RubberDuckGPT is a conversational agent that deliberately refuses to give answers and instead reflects user prompts back as probing questions to stimulate deeper thinking. Rather than solving problems directly, it uses Socratic-style reflections — e.g., turning “Help me debug this code” into “Why do you think your code isn’t working?” — to make users articulate assumptions, constraints, and prior attempts. The behavior mirrors the “rubber duck debugging” technique: externalizing thought through targeted questioning to surface overlooked issues and clarify goals. For the AI/ML community this is significant as an interaction paradigm shift: instead of optimizing models to produce ever-more-complete outputs, RubberDuckGPT foregrounds scaffolding and meta-cognition. Technically it can be implemented as a prompt-engineered system message or a policy layer that enforces question-generation, or refined through instruction tuning / RLHF to learn effective probing strategies. Implications include improved debugging and learning outcomes, reduced user overreliance on model outputs (and potentially fewer hallucinations), and new evaluation metrics focused on conversational Socratic efficacy. Trade-offs include possible user frustration when direct answers are needed, and design challenges around when to switch between reflective and solution-oriented modes in mixed workflows.