Rubber Duck Agent

Didn't know you needed a rubber duck to measure how locked in you are? Now you do. Inspired by "rubber ducking", interact via chat with our locally run LLM, watch its mood vary from git activity.

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Inspiration

Developers often talk to rubber ducks to debug code — it’s funny, grounding, and surprisingly effective. We made the duck alive that watches your coding habits, reacts to your productivity, celebrates commits, warns when you’re burning out, and occasionally roasts you for fun. Something between a digital pet, productivity tracker, and sarcastic coding companion.

What it does

RDA is a local, privacy-friendly AI pet that lives in your terminal or browser. It can monitor system and git activity(CPU, commit, idle time, etc.), changes its mood, ASCII appearance depending on your behaviour, and uses Gemini for autonomous thoughts and random commentary during your coding session, and allows you to chat via a local API and WS backend, and evolves to other form of "duck" as you code more and gain more personality.

How we built it

Backend with Python(FastAPI), WS for live updates, HTTP for chat. Sensors with built in Python modules and git CLI, and using Gemini for agentic thinking for autonomous behaviour, and Ollama for chat and mood reasoning. Frontend with HTML and JS.

Challenges we ran into

Getting Ollama to reply useful content and designing expressive ASCII ducks that don’t look cursed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a fully agentic AI pet that observes, reasons, and acts autonomously, and it is "alive".

What we learned

How to use the Gemini API and make use of real-time telemetry to reflect it in a UI.

What's next for Rubber Duck Agent

  • Add machine learning prediction of developer moods and “burnout forecasting”
  • Add TTS and desktop notifications
  • Build a plugin system for VSCode/Neovim
  • Expand the evolution system with unlockable forms and achievements

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