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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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This reduces the amount of prompting you need to do since more of its assumptions will automatically be correct, but is by no means required. I use AI quite successfully on very janky 30 year old SQR code -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQR if you don't know what SQR is, because neither did I before I got this current job.

I agree. When I try to one-shot or purely vibe code, I get junk, but my speed up is massive with no quality decline when I hand-hold it just a little bit. For example, I just added some names to a drop down list in a client somewhere. It formatted the names in the wrong order compared to the other ones. But because I am still testing everything it does, I caught it and it fixed it instantly. My speedup is still massive compared to the same task with no AI. I'm suspecting people who complain are just bad at managing an AI or a person and want to nitpick.

When I try to one-shot or purely vibe code, I get junk

That's fascinating. It's been my experience that the more I iterate, the worse it gets. It usually only works well when I one shot it.

Probably the context window filling up?

Going from a one-shot to something more robust can be problematic because AI will often default to simple dirty solutions, which subsequent prompts double down on. If you plan on building something robust from the ground-up, however, it's very doable with AI over many prompts.

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