In the end all code ends up as machine language. Generally the way to write effective code is to use a high-level language and let a smart compiler expand a tiny bit of high-level code it into a great deal of low-level machine language.
But another way I seem to end up doing this is using vim. I will generate mounds and mounds of temporary, throw-away, ugly code, but I will generate it extremely fast using vim. It's almost like vim is acting like an extremely high-level compiler; I take a very-high-level idea and using a little bit of vim trickery, I let vim expand it out into a large amount of high-level code.
Say I have a data file with two huge tab-separated columns; I need to insert the value from the second column into a table anywhere I find the value in the first column. There's possibly some way of doing this with one or two SQL queries to slurp the data file directly, but I don't know how to do it in MS-SQL server at work (ugh) and the brute-force vim/Perl way of doing it comes immediately to mind:
:perldo s{^([^\t]+)\t(.*)$}{UPDATE table SET field_x = '$2' WHERE field_y = '$1'}
It could also be done with a native vim regex obviously. Either way I end up with pages upon pages of SQL commands each of which does a single update. This is sloppy and slow, but it scales better than you'd think. I can do many thousands of inserts in this way in a few seconds. If I was doing millions rather than thousands I'd probably take the time to do this the right way, but I rarely if ever find myself needing to do millions of updates.
Is sloppy, ugly high-level code still bad if you didn't actually WRITE it, but had a program quickly write it for you? Machine language is sloppy-looking too, but it's sloppy for a reason (i.e. that's what computers understand). My sloppiness is for another reason: I'm lazy and this saves me time. But I feel like I may be developing bad habits. Then again there are times when I only need a hammer for a few seconds to pound in a nail or two, and I'm not trying to build a whole house. In time like those any hammer will probably do.