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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17812 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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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.

You type in variable names? Like every letter manually? I type in the first letter or two and hit tab. It automatically fills in or a drop down menu shows me the names starting with that.

Same thing with file paths. First few letters, tab, first few letters, tab.

You type in variable names? Like every letter manually?

Not usually, no. I have the misfortune to work on a Python project right now and we're using SQLAlchemy as an ORM. The parameters get passed in a dictionary where you need the name of the dictionary keys to match the names of the parameters in the query. I transposed 2 letters between what the query had and what the parameter dictionary had. In C#/.NET (my preferred language) this would be impossible with EF Core, and the tooling around Dapper is much better than whatever crap SQLAlchemy has so I'm pretty sure the IDE would have detected it for Dapper.

This is the largest Python project I've ever done significant work on and I hate it. 99% of the pain points I've had are due to the terrible type system. Also I miss LINQ every time I write a loop.

Python can get slightly better with type annotations - which is also something that claude is woefully incapable of doing well.

Yeah, we're using type annotations, and they're still pretty garbage too. "Expected type str, actually found 'property'" even though the property is a str lol. Or "Expected List[SomeClass] actually found List[type[SomeClass]]" and the documentation for the type system for how to fix this crap is awful.

Two mandatory tools for writing typed python:

  1. Vscode. You need the realtime feedback on errors and it also tells you what the computer thinks every variable is.

  2. Ironically, an LLM. They are great at telling you what you screwed up to get an error. Yet horrible at actually fixing the issue.

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