[Stratoscope]

I have sometimes done just this. First I write the simplest possible brute force code, something that any competent programmer can look at and say, "Yes, this may be slow, but it is straightforward and obvious that it will handle all cases."

Then I write the optimized code and use a test like yours to compare the results between the simple code and the optimized code.

One time I needed to write a function to search for a specific pattern in a binary file and change it. So I wrote the brute force code as a first step, the same code that anyone would probably write as a simple solution. It worked the first time, and a couple of people reviewed the code and said "yep, even if it's slow, it is correct."

But this code took more than a second to run!

Of course I thought about optimizing it with Boyer-Moore or the like. Then I went, "Hold on to your horses. This isn't something like a web page load where one second matters. It's part of a build process that only runs a few times a day and already takes several minutes to run. One extra second is nothing!"

In the wise words of Kenny Rogers in The Gambler:

  You got to know when to hold 'em,
  know when to fold 'em
  Know when to walk away
  and know when to run

[mark-r]

Knuth's famous quote about premature optimization captures this perfectly.

"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

[scott_w]

Also true for deciding whether to write code at all! About 15 years ago I was working with a junior who'd spent 3 hours trying to automate some data editing until I said "mate, you can just edit it all by hand in about an hour!"

[taeric]

I had a similar one where a billing mistake had happened in a system and the other devs were trying to find out how to determine all of the bad values. I asked if they had simply looked at the top N that could fit on their screen sorted by value. The incorrect values were the obvious outliers. Only about 4 of them. They had been blocked on identifying them for about an hour.

[VBprogrammer]

Funny enough, with LLMs this trade off may well have flipped. For simple tasks like given a string like X, format it like Y, they work amazingly well.

[scott_w]

Absolutely. Even back then, trying to script it would sometimes be fine. I've had plenty of situations where I'd try to write a script, give it 30 minutes then say "fuck it, I'm hand-fixing it." The same probably applies to LLMs, you just need to set a cut-off point before it stops being worthwhile.

[lettuceconstant]

Sure, but I have to obtain my dopamine somehow.

[throwaway-kg8d5]

Very true. I would have gone with

  Every coder knows
  the secret to optimizin’
  is knowing what to throw away
  and knowing what to keep