Well I was assuming you already understood the domain and the algorithm (or at least a good idea how you’d solve the problem). If you don’t, sure having an LLM cough up something is probably faster than finding and teaching yourself a new algorithm.
I definitely wouldn’t trust an LLM to come up with an optimal algorithm if I didn’t already have an idea of how to solve the problem myself though. There’s too much room for subtle bugs and unknown unknowns.
Tests aren’t a substitute for thoroughly understanding a solution (and thoroughly understanding a solution involves at least having an idea about the tradeoffs of different solutions, which you won’t have if you had no idea how to solve something yourself).
Most functions in line of business software though are going to be something like “loop over each item in this list, transform them from one format to another, then add them all up and save that somewhere.”
Actually typing out the code to do that is in no way a bottleneck for me (unless I’m working in an unfamiliar language and don’t understand the syntax well).
