It happens all the time. Way before LLM. There were countless times I implemented an algorithm from a paper or a book while not fully understanding it (in other words, I can't prove the correctness or time complexity without referencing the original paper).
>(in other words, I can't prove the correctness ... without referencing the original paper).
agrees with what I said in my previous comment:
>if you don't understand it fully, how can you say .... that it will work?
(irrelevant parts from our original comments above, replaced with ... , without loss of meaning to my argument.)
both those quoted fragments, yours and mine, mean basically the same thing, i.e. that both you and the GP don't know whether it will work.
it's not that one cannot use some piece of code without knowing whether it works; everybody does that all the time, from algorithm books for example, as you said.
> if you don't understand it fully, how can you say that it will look great to you, and that it will work?
Presumably, that simply reflects that a primary developer always has an advantage of having a more reliable understanding of a large code base - and the insights into the problem that come about during development challenges - than a reviewer of such code.
A lot of important bug subtle insights, many sub-verbal, into a problem come from going through the large and small challenges of creating something that solves it. Reviewers just don't get those insights as reliably.
Reviewers can't see all the subtle or non-obvious alternate paths or choices. They are less likely to independently identify subtle traps.
I mean, depends what you mean by ‘work’. For instance, something which produces the correct output, and leaks memory, is that working? Something which produces the correct output, but takes a thousand times longer than it should; is that working? Something which produces output which looks superficially correct and passes basic tests, is that working?
‘Works for me’ isn’t actually _that_ useful a signal without serious qualification.
puzzled. if you don't understand it fully, how can you say that it will look great to you, and that it will work?