A Debugging Companion that follows the Socratic Method

Alwin R — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:12:58 +0000

This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge

What I Built

A Socratic debugging companion that asks questions instead of giving answers.

Demo

Link: https://github.com/alwnraj/rubber-duck

### Start a debugging session
rubber-duck "my API returns 500 but only on Tuesdays"

### Continue session
rubber-duck --continue "I checked the logs"

### Provide file context
rubber-duck --context error.log "why is this failing?"

My Experience with GitHub Copilot CLI

I built this tool to work with the Copilot CLI while using Copilot CLI itself to build it. Copilot CLI helped the architect the subprocess integration. The core of this project is crafting prompts that force socratic questioning. I used Copilot CLI to iterate on prompt templates, asking "how can I make this prompt more forward?". When writing tests for the CLI tool, opilot helped me understand that I could override HOME in the test environment to isolate each test's config.I wasn't familiar with GitHub Actions matrix builds. Copilot CLI generated the workflow file and explained how to test across multiple Node versions and OSes.

Forem: Alwin R

A Debugging Companion that follows the Socratic Method

What I Built

Demo

My Experience with GitHub Copilot CLI