Software Engineering: The Art of Thinking Out Loud (with AI)

A colleague said something to me recently that I keep coming back to: "Often, by the time you've finished articulating a complex problem for the AI, you've already solved it yourself." It sounds almost like a joke. You open a chat window, start typing out your problem in careful detail — and somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph, the answer appears. Not from the AI. From you. If you've worked with LLMs seriously, you've probably experienced this. And I think it points to something important about what is actually changing in our craft — something that goes beyond the usual conversation about automation and job displacement. The Rubber Duck, Promoted Developers have known for decades that explaining a problem out loud helps solve it. The classic technique involves a rubber duck: you place it on your desk, narrate your code to it, and the act of articulation forces you to confront the assumptions you'd quietly made. The duck never responds. That's not the point. The LLM is a rubber duck that occasionally says something useful back. But even when it doesn't — even when the response is generic or slightly off — the discipline of formulating the prompt has already done its work. You've had to be precise. You've had to strip away ambiguity. You've had to decide what actually matters. That process is not a workaround. It is thinking. The Inversion of the Workflow In the pre-AI era, the typical development workflow looked something like this: you had a rough mental model of the solution, you started coding, and you discovered the edge cases along the way. The code was exploratory. The thinking happened during the writing. With AI assistance, that workflow inverts. Vague inputs produce vague outputs — the model has no way to compensate for an underspecified problem. So precision becomes mandatory upfront. You have to think before you type, not while you type. This is a more demanding cognitive posture. It requires holding the full shape of a problem in your head be