Voice rubber-duck debugging · macOS · coming soon

It won't solveyour bug.That's the point.

Waddleby floats above your code. You explain the problem out loud; it listens, nods along, and asks the one dumb question you skipped over. Full-duplex voice, Socratic to the bone. The answer stays yours, even on the days when the only colleague in the room is a duck.

Join the waitlistWatch it not answer ↓

A real session · 40 seconds in

  1. 00:07you

    okay. so this cache should be fresh here…

  2. 00:11duck

    mhm.

  3. 00:19you

    …because we invalidate on every write. so the read path can't be stale.

  4. 00:24duck

    how do you know a write happened?

  5. 00:31you

    because the test… wait. the test seeds the database directly. it never touches the write path.

  6. 00:33you

    found it.

  7. 00:35duck

    nice.

  8. 00:36log

    → Bug Journal: cache looked stale because the test seeded the DB and bypassed invalidation.

The duck saw the bug at line two.
It said “mhm.” — because you were about to find it yourself.

The escalation ladder

Five levels of help.
It starts at silence and hates leaving it.

  1. Silence

    The default. You talk, it listens. mhm. okay. I see. Three words, tops.

  2. Clarify

    You pause after a finished thought. One short question: what does that function actually receive?

  3. Challenge

    You're looping, or stating guesses as facts. have you actually seen that log line — or are you assuming it?

  4. Hint

    Still stuck. It points, it doesn't tell: where could that value change between those two lines?

  5. Solve locked

    Opens only when you say the words: duck, just tell me. Then it's direct, brief — and goes right back to level 1.

For the home office

Working alone
shouldn't mean thinking alone.

It's 3pm, the flat is silent, and you've been staring at the same stack trace since lunch. In an office you'd grab whoever walked past. At home there's nobody to grab, so the bug sits there and so do you. Waddleby is the colleague who never left the room. No meeting invite, no “quick call?”, no judgement. You start talking, it starts listening, and saying it out loud is usually all it takes.

A MacBook where Waddleby peeks out from under the menu-bar notch, watching over the screen
It lives up by the notch, peeking over your code and staying out of your way.

What's in the duck

A toy on the outside.
Principles on the inside.

Privacy you can see

Mic muted? The headphones go on. Screen sharing off? Sleep mask on. Not a settings toggle three menus deep — it's right on the duck's face, wired to the actual mic and capture state.

It sees your screen only when asked

Hit ⌥⌘L or say look at this and it gets one snapshot of your frontmost window — never a stream. Its eyes flash on every capture, so nothing is ever taken quietly.

Interruptible, like a good colleague

Full-duplex voice. Before speaking it raises a wing and waits 600 ms — start talking and it never even begins. No monologues, ever: fifteen seconds is its hard cap.

Your key. Your Mac. Nothing else.

Waddleby runs on the OpenAI Realtime API with your own key, which lives in your Keychain. No account, no backend, no telemetry. Transcripts stay in a local database you can delete.

The Bug Journal

Every time you shout found it!, the duck logs one line — what the bug turned out to be. Months later, that journal is a greatest-hits album of your own blind spots.