alt Hacker NewsBut what if your rubber duck is actually steering your thought process (since you may not have a consolidated one)? In this way I think the AI as editor is far better than a rubber duck AI. While in the former, it might point out your mistakes and give useful advices (which is similar to what you describe), it might not steer your thought (unless your mistakes are far too severe!), and actually help in your reasoning. But AI as a brainstorming rubber duck (or thinking tool) could be harmful to your thought process.
Replies
If you let it, sure. But I don't go into a session asking 'what should I write.' Rather, I ask it to help fight me on my ideas, so that I can stress-test the logic behind them, which is precisely what I do with humans too.
Only with humans, it's admittedly way more fun. :)
That's a real risk and I'd be lying if I said it never happens. But the distinction I'd draw is between using AI to generate conclusions vs using it to stress-test yours. Thinking FOR you vs thinking WITH you. When I say rubber ducking I mean something closer to what borski described — "fight and engage me on my ideas" — not "tell me what to think."
The steering problem is worst when you go in without any sort of position. If you sit down and say "what should I write about X" then yeah, you're risking ending up thinking whatever the model thinks. But if you sit down with even a half-formed argument and conviction and say "here's what I think, build on it and poke holes in it," the dynamic is completely different. You're still driving. You still need to maintain meta-awareness of how your thinking might be shifting in response to the AI, but you remain in control.
With that I think the editor vs thinking tool framing is a false binary. The best use I've found is somewhere in between — more adversarial than an editor, less open-ended than brainstorming. Alternating between convergent building together and structured disagreement, basically.