Home / the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc / skills-from-the-artificer · GitHub

rubber-duck SKILL.md skillA

rubber-duck from the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.

Install it, pinned

mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/rubber-duck@git:20261014.1109f98

Pins git:20261014.1109f98 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.

Audit grade: A, 17 of 17 checks passed
Kind: SKILL.md skill
Repository: the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer
Path: rubber-duck/SKILL.md
Versions recorded: 2
Latest version: git:20261014.1109f98, committed Oct 14, 2026
First version recorded: Apr 15, 2026
Size: 10,344 bytes
Repository stars: 6
License: MIT

Rubber duck debugging and claim-walking. Use when a user is stuck on a bug ("I don't understand why this isn't working", "talk me through this bug", "rubber duck", "stuck", "doesn't make sense", "help me think") or has been debugging 20+ minutes without progress. Also use, with no human in the loop, to walk the claims in a PR description or design doc against the actual code ("author claims...", "walk the design", "design for #N, answer your own questions from evidence"), or any time an agent…

Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.

What the file says

# Rubber Duck Debugging

## Core Principle

**The bug lives in the gap between what you think the code does and what it actually does.**

You can't see that gap from inside your own head. Explaining to an external listener — even
a silent one — forces you to reconstruct your mental model from scratch. That reconstruction
is where the bug surfaces.

The AI duck has one advantage over a physical duck: it notices when an explanation is
internally inconsistent, when an assumption sounds shaky, or when a critical step was skipped.

## Pick a Mode First

| Situation | Mode |
|---|---|
| A person is present and stuck | **Interactive** (the protocol below) |
| Args say "autonomous", "walk it", "author claims", "answer your own questions", or there is no one to reply | **Autonomous** (see "Autonomous Mode") |

Why two modes: the interactive duck works because *the human* must reconstruct their mental
model. An agent has no one to reconstruct for, and an agent asking itself questions and
answering from memory just repeats its own fluent guess. Research on self-correction found it
helps only when the check is grounded in something external: code execution, tests, tools
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

The exact contents, by fingerprint

mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/rubber-duck@sha256:2e52b21ce031ad4c

The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20261014.1109f98, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.

Badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_7vqbsgjo336wb4eb.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_7vqbsgjo336wb4eb)

4 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.

Versions

The registry has recorded 2 versions of this file, between Apr 15, 2026 and Oct 14, 2026, about one every 182 days.

version	committed	commit	size	audit
git:20261014.1109f98 latest	2026-10-14	1109f98	10,344 B	A	view · diff
git:20260415.109c051	2026-04-15	109c051	6,896 B	A	view

Audit of the latest version

A 17 of 17 checks passed. Fixed automatic checks with no AI involved, so the same checks give the same answer every run.

pass: Frontmatter block present
pass: Frontmatter declares a name
pass: Frontmatter declares a description
pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (10344 bytes)
pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
pass: No credential-shaped string
pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
pass: No text hidden with inline styles
pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
pass: No link to a raw IP address
pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer · 6 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-11-08 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_7vqbsgjo336wb4eb
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/rubber-duck
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/2e52b21ce031ad4c7fc3cda2da517ade0d43966094a9bc53670dc98c965d98cc

Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.

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