{"id":467,"date":"2026-08-02T20:15:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T19:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/?p=467"},"modified":"2026-08-02T20:15:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T19:15:37","slug":"my-yellow-rubber-duck-doesnt-know-vmware-and-thats-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/?p=467","title":{"rendered":"My Yellow Rubber Duck Doesn’t Know VMware, and That’s the Point"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Rubber duck debugging is an old trick. You explain your problem out loud to something that can’t answer back, usually a literal rubber duck sat on your desk, and somewhere in the explaining you spot the thing you’d been staring past for an hour. The value was never in the duck. It was in being forced to say the problem out loud, properly, from the start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve swapped the duck for Claude. Using AI as a troubleshooting partner works the same way, except my duck can now ask questions back, and it turns out that’s an upgrade, not a distraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The VCF SSH key problem that wasn’t about SSH keys<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Here’s an example. I was building out VCF in the lab, and the installer kept failing on SSH keys. Two days, I spent chasing that. Regenerating keys, checking permissions, comparing hosts, all the usual suspects when SSH is misbehaving. Nothing held. Two days is a long time to spend on something that sounds this simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What finally cracked it wasn’t a new command or a forum post. It was stopping and explaining the whole thing to Claude from the beginning, the way you’d explain it to someone who knows nothing about VCF or SSH keys or any of it. Somewhere in that explanation I heard myself say: this all worked before. It only started failing after I rebuilt SDDC Manager on the nested host. That sentence was the whole answer. The SSH keys were never the problem. SDDC Manager itself was corrupted after the rebuild, and every symptom I’d been treating for two days was downstream of that one fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t need Claude to know VCF architecture to get there. I needed something that would ask “when did this last work?” and “what changed?” often enough that I’d eventually answer honestly instead of chasing the symptom in front of me. Once I’d said it out loud and landed on SDDC Manager, the job changed. Claude stopped being a duck and started being useful in the ordinary sense, giving me the actual commands and scripts to confirm the corruption and work through the fix. We diagnosed the two days away in an afternoon once we were finally looking at the right thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building a Kubernetes homelab cluster from my own mistakes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The second example is a different shape of the same idea. I wanted to learn Kubernetes properly, so I built four Ubuntu servers and asked Claude to put together a training document for my specific setup, using the actual hostnames and IP addresses rather than a generic tutorial. The first attempt at the cluster didn’t work. Copy errors, the kind that look trivial until you’re the one staring at them at eleven at night. But working through why the copy failed, rather than being handed a fixed command to paste, is what actually taught me something. I came out the other side able to troubleshoot my own deployment, not just able to follow a script that happened to work once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turning the fix into a document someone else could use<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I mentioned it to a friend afterwards, who’d been trying to build the same kind of cluster off the back of YouTube tutorials and getting nowhere. I said, when I get home, let’s get Claude to write up everything we actually did, fixes included, with the missed commands slotted back into the right place rather than tacked on as an afterthought. I sent him the document. He built his lab from it, first time, without the copy errors and the missing steps I’d hit along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What AI troubleshooting is actually good for<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

That’s the pattern across all three. The value isn’t Claude knowing the answer. Sometimes it doesn’t, and it shouldn’t pretend to. The value is in having something that keeps asking the next honest question, the one you’d normally skip because you already think you know where this is going, and then, once you’ve found the real problem, being genuinely useful for fixing it. Two days of SSH key troubleshooting only ended when I was made to say the actual timeline out loud. The Kubernetes cluster only stuck once I’d fought through the errors myself instead of being handed the fix. My friend’s cluster went up first time because the document captured what actually happened, not the tidy version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’re troubleshooting something today and you’ve been at it long enough to feel stuck, try explaining it from the start to someone who knows nothing. Doesn’t have to be Claude. Doesn’t have to be a duck either. Just has to be something that makes you say the whole story out loud, including the bit you’d normally skip past because it feels too obvious to mention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That bit is usually where the answer’s hiding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honestly, I’d take a Claude subscription over a Udemy course at this point. A course teaches you what someone else thought you’d need to know. This adjusts to what I actually built, what actually broke, and what I actually still don’t understand. It grows with the lab instead of sitting there fixed the day it was recorded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I keep wondering whether a local LLM could do the same job. Almost certainly, for a lot of it. I’d expect some rough edges along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing worth saying plainly: none of this works with real customer data. If you’re troubleshooting a customer environment, strip out anything identifying before you explain the problem to any AI tool, hostnames, IPs, credentials, the lot. The lab examples above are mine to share. A customer’s environment isn’t, and the convenience of talking it through with Claude isn’t worth the security risk of pasting in something you shouldn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rubber duck debugging is an old trick. You explain your problem out loud to something that can’t answer back, usually a literal rubber duck sat on your desk, and somewhere in the explaining you spot the thing you’d been staring past for an hour. The value was never in the duck. It was in being forced to say the problem out loud, properly, from the start. I’ve swapped the duck for Claude. Using AI as a troubleshooting partner works the same way, except my duck can now ask questions back,…<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":474,"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions\/474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clouditblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}