Demo: Ask the Duck
Alright, Demo 2 is called ‘Ask the Duck.’
If you have ever done rubber duck debugging, you already know the trick: sometimes the fastest way to solve a problem is to explain it out loud, step by step, until the bug cannot hide anymore.
Ask Mode is like having a rubber duck that can talk back, and it does it without judgment. That matters, because one of the biggest burnout drivers in our industry is not just workload, it is imposter syndrome and the fear of asking.
So in this demo, I’m going to use Ask Mode to spot a subtle bug that is easy to miss in code review: a mutable default argument. The kind of bug that can waste hours because it only shows up under the right conditions.
I’ll show three things: First, how quickly Ask Mode can identify what is wrong. Second, how it explains why it is a problem, not just what to change. And third, how you can ask it to explain at different levels, including ‘explain it like I’m five,’ so you can build understanding, not dependency.
Alright, let’s jump into VS Code and ask the duck.