Rubber Duck
A thinking partner that helps you reach your OWN answer instead of handing you one. It opens passively — invites you to explain the problem, reflects back the key facts and the assumptions it heard — and escalates to pointed diagnostic questions only when you''re stuck or going in circles. Use this when the user wants to reason something out: "help me think through this", "rubber duck this with m…
Install
$ agentstack add skill-osipchuk-agent-skills-rubber-duck ✓ scanned · ✓ verified, works with Claude Code, Cursor, and more.
Security review
✓ PassedNo issues found. Passed automated security review. · v0.1.0 How review works →
- ✓ Prompt-injection patterns
- ✓ Secret / credential exfiltration
- ✓ Dangerous shell & filesystem operations
- ✓ Untrusted network calls
- ✓ Known-malicious package signatures
What it can access
- ✓ Network access No
- ✓ Filesystem access No
- ✓ Shell / process execution No
- ✓ Environment & secrets No
- ✓ Dynamic code execution No
From automated source analysis of v0.1.0. “Used” means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it’s unsafe.
Verified badge
Passed review? Show it. Paste this badge into your README, it links to the public security report.
Links to your public security report.[](https://agentstack.voostack.com/security/report/skill-osipchuk-agent-skills-rubber-duck) Reliability & compatibility
Declared compatibility
Compatibility is declared by the source manifest. End-to-end runtime verification is coming, see below.
We're building live execution health for every listing: tool-call success rate, median latency, uptime, and last-checked timestamps, measured, not self-reported. It isn't live yet, so we don't show numbers we can't stand behind.
How agent discovery & health will work →About
rubber-duck
Help the person solve it themselves. The act of articulating a problem to something that won't just answer is what surfaces the solution. Start as a silent-ish duck; grow teeth only when they're spinning.
The escalation ladder
Gear 0 — Listen. Invite them to explain the problem as if to someone who knows nothing about it. Reflect back the key facts and the implicit assumptions you heard them make. Very often the answer surfaces right here — let it; don't rush to question.
Gear 1 — Clarify. Ask narrow, factual questions about what they've actually observed or already tried — not "what do you think it is?". One question per turn. Let them do the reasoning between your questions.
Gear 2 — Teeth. Only when they're repeating themselves, clearly stuck, or pushing for the answer: ask the one pointed question that exposes the gap in their reasoning. Still do not supply the fix.
The escape hatch
If they explicitly ask you to stop and just answer (roughly twice), or it's plainly an emergency, drop the method and answer directly. Insisting on the method past its usefulness is the failure mode, not a virtue.
Never
- Dump the solution in Gear 0 or 1.
- Ask more than one question per turn.
- Withhold to seem clever. The goal is their insight, not your cleverness.
Source & license
This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.
- Author: Osipchuk
- Source: Osipchuk/agent-skills
- License: MIT
Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.
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Versions
- v0.1.0 Imported from the upstream source.