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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7768 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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If your experience has been anything like mine, I imagine that you've found that LLMs are useful for generating boiler-plate material but worse than useless for anything where you need to be worried about accurate citations, or having your arguments picked apart by an opposing counsel. Here's the thing though, I imagine that coding is much like the law in that a competent practitioner doesn't actually need all that much help generating boiler-plate material, you just pull the relevant template from your folder and fill in the required information.

At least in this codebase, there really isn't even a whole lot of boilerplate in the first place.

At this point, we have a few theories. Either:

  1. We're wildly incompetent
  2. What we're doing is so far off the silicon valley beaten path of "Uber for artisanal cheeses, but on the blockchain" that all the model's statistical guardrails break down.
  3. The people who are using it effectively are lying about how to do so in order to hide a real or perceived competitive edge.

Or

Four - A majority of the people claiming industry shaking performance improvements in Q1 2026 are scamming everybody else for that sweet, sweet substack money.

Hell if I know which one it is.

Curious what language and sub field you're working with. I've found wildly different performance on similar tasks across different languages. Best performance is definitely typescript. Python is alright. Flutter can be a complete joke. Primarily use Claude Opus for everything. I think it's made me mountains more productive in typescript.

90% of the backend is Java. 90% of the front end is JavaScript.

Exactly my experience (also in a legal field)

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