Talking about rubber duck intelligence, there is a two step "thinking then respond" that recent iterations of llms have started using. It is literally a rubber duck during the thinking phase. I downloaded a local llm with this feature and had it run and the cli did not hide the "thinking" once done. The end product was better quality than if it had tried to spit an answer immediately (I toggled thinking off and it definitely was dumber, so I think you are right for the generation of llms before "thinking"