🦆 rubber-duck

A Claude Code plugin that helps you think - not by giving answers, but by asking the right questions.

Most AI tools race to give you the answer. rubber-duck does something different: it slows down, asks one question at a time, and helps you reason through the problem yourself.

This is the Socratic method, packaged as a Claude Code plugin.

There's a well-known debugging technique where you explain your problem out loud to a rubber duck. Just the act of articulating it — slowly, carefully — often surfaces the answer before the duck says a word.

The problem: a rubber duck can't ask follow-up questions.

rubber-duck gives the duck a voice. When you're stuck, confused, or just want to understand something deeply instead of copy-pasting a fix, this plugin shifts Claude into a guided thinking partner that holds the line even when you beg for the answer.

For developers who want to actually learn. For seniors mentoring juniors. For anyone building intuition, not just shipping code.

Via Claude Code marketplace (recommended):

/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/mo-inkhan/rubber-duck
/plugin install rubber-duck@duck

Via git:

git clone https://github.com/mo-inkhan/rubber-duck
cd rubber-duck/plugin
bash install.sh

> /duck My API returns a 500 but only when the user has a free plan

🦆 Okay, I'm in Rubber Duck mode — I'll ask questions instead of solving things for you.
   Use /duck:reveal whenever you want me to step out of this.

   Let's start here: what do you know about what's different between a free plan
   user and a paid plan user at the point this request hits your controller?

> /duck:design I need to add real-time notifications to my Laravel app

🦆 Good problem to think through carefully. First question:
   When you say "real-time" — what's the actual tolerance here? Would
   a 2-second delay be acceptable, or does this need to feel instant?

> /duck:status

## 🦆 Duck Session Summary

Problem: API returning 500 only for free plan users

What you've figured out:
- The error is in the billing middleware, not the controller
- Free plan users have a null subscription_id

Still open:
- Whether the middleware is checking for null or just falsy

You're currently: one step away from identifying the exact null check

> /duck:reveal

You got pretty far on your own — you correctly identified the billing
middleware and traced it to the subscription_id field. The key thing
you were one step from: the check on line 47 uses `!$sub` which treats
both null and an expired subscription the same way...

After every session, rubber-duck logs whether you used /duck:reveal and maintains a running streak of sessions where you solved the problem without peeking.

🦆✅  Rubber Duck session complete.
   You solved it without peeking!
   No-peek streak: 7 sessions 🔥
   All-time: 14/17 solved without peeking

Session logs are stored locally at ~/.rubber-duck/sessions/.

The rubber duck technique works because articulation forces clarity. When you have to explain something, you expose your own assumptions.

This plugin doesn't try to make Claude smarter. It tries to make you think harder — by making Claude ask better questions instead of giving faster answers.

The escape hatch (/duck:reveal) exists because sometimes you genuinely need the answer. But it's there when you choose it, not when Claude gives up on you.

PRs welcome. Especially interested in:

• New question toolkits for specific problem types (SQL debugging, regex, async/await confusion)
• A /duck:learn mode that teaches concepts after you've reasoned to them yourself
• Export session logs to markdown for personal knowledge bases

Via git:

cd rubber-duck/plugin
git pull
bash install.sh

Re-running the installer is safe — it overwrites plugin files and skips hook registration if already present.

MIT