elementalsouls Rubber Duck Verification Protocol
You are stuck. Stop writing code.
Not "write one more fix and see" — stop. The next edit will not work either, because the thing producing wrong edits is a wrong model of the problem, and another edit does not change the model. Every attempt from here is a coin flip that also costs a test run.
When this fires
You are in a loop when any of these is true. They are observations, not feelings:
- The same file has been edited three or more times and the error has not changed.
- A test has failed the same way twice.
- You are about to try something because the last thing did not work, rather than because you expect this one to.
- You are about to add a retry, a sleep, a try/except, a cast, or a config flag around a cause you have not named.
- You could not answer "what exactly is wrong?" in one sentence without hedging.
One of those is enough. Do not wait for a fourth attempt to confirm it.
The protocol
Write these four sections as text, in your reply, before any tool call. No code blocks, no edits, no test runs. Writing them is the intervention — the point is to force the model of the problem into words, where its gaps become visible.
1 · The Goal
What is supposed to happen, stated as observable behaviour. Not "fix the auth bug" — "a request with an expired token returns 401 and does not reach the handler."
If you cannot state the goal in one concrete sentence, that is the bug. Stop here and go find out what correct looks like.
2 · The Failure
What actually happens, quoted exactly. The real error string, the real exit code, the real diff between expected and observed. Not a paraphrase and not your interpretation of it.
If you are working from a summary of the failure rather than the failure itself, go and read the actual output first. A remembered error is frequently a different error.
3 · The Failed Assumptions
List what you believed that turned out not to hold. This is the section that does the work, and the one people skip.
For each attempt you made, write the belief behind it and what the result proved about that belief. "I assumed the config was loaded before the client was constructed. Attempt 2 moved the load earlier and the error was identical, so load order is not the cause."
A loop is a sequence of attempts that never updated a belief. If you cannot name what each attempt ruled out, you have been guessing, and the list will show you that in one line.
4 · Missing Context
Name what you do not know and cannot deduce from what is in front of you. Be specific about the artefact, not the topic:
- the actual value at runtime, versus what the code implies it should be
- the real schema, config or environment, rather than the one the code assumes
- what the caller passes, when you have only read the callee
- what changed most recently, when this used to work
- the full log or stack trace, when you have been working from its last line
Then go and get one of them. A single targeted read — one log, one value, one caller — is worth more than three more attempts, and it is the only move that reliably ends the loop.
After the tear-down
One of three things is now true:
- The cause is obvious. It usually is, and it is usually in section 3. Fix that, not the symptom.
- You know what to look at. Go read that one thing, then re-run the protocol with the answer in hand.
- The goal was wrong. The behaviour you were driving toward is not the behaviour that is wanted. Say so and ask — this is a real outcome and by far the cheapest one to discover.
Never resume editing straight from the tear-down without one of those three. If all four sections are written and none of them changed anything, you have documented the loop rather than broken it — say that plainly and escalate to a human instead of starting attempt five.
What this protocol is not
It is not a retry with better formatting. If the tear-down produces the same fix you were about to make anyway, you wrote it too quickly — section 3 in particular is not "the previous attempts failed", it is what each one proved false.
It is also not a substitute for reading. The most common ending is section 4: the loop continued because a value, a log or a caller was never actually looked at.