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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Get Claude to walk me through it

This option is good in theory, but in practice requires a good amount of self discipline. It is just so easy to prompt the AI in a way that straight up gives you the answer, then convince yourself that you were the one to think about it following the LLM's guidance. If you are mindful of the pitfalls it can work, but I am not sure I would trust the average person to do it properly.

I've found LLMs the most useful in identifying bugs I caused by embarrassing typos (or cooy paste errors where I didn't change the value of something after pasting). Just 10 minutes wgo it solved a bug by pointing out that I had transposed two letters in a variable name. Though in fairness if I was using a real language instead of a toy language like Python the IDE could have caught it for me.

It works very well for walking you through how to use a particular tool, app, or device. (e.g. Excel). Because if AI is doing a walkthrough, you still need to press the buttons and key in the inputs to complete the task.

Walking you through solving a math problem - that's extremely dubious.

Walking you through solving a math problem - that's extremely dubious.

I've mentioned this before but just a couple of months ago I wanted to solve a simple first year university level math problem (a system of two first order differential equations). I got three different solutions depending on how I wrote the problem (eg. using abstract variables or ones based on the actual problem). Every explanation was very confident, detailed and of course wrong in a way that was apparent if you understood the domain or verified the solution by hand. And this is pretty much as simple as real world university level math can get.

Then I googled the proper syntax for how to input the problem into Matlab and got the correct result in much less time than it took to ask AI and verify it, even had AI given the correct answer.

You could ask AI how to input the problem into matlab

Google was faster and more reliable. I just wanted to see first if AI could solve a simple but not entirely trivial non-coding problem.

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