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No, math is major part of writing good code, but when was the last time you've seen somebody put effort into writing O(n) algorithm? 99% of programming is "import sort from sort; sort.sortThisReallyQuick". Programming is mostly writing code that just compiles and eventually gives correct results (and has bugs). You can do a lot of programming just buy copy-pasting results from stackoverflow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

https://old.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/35prfv/designer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U



In any real-world application you'll sooner than later run into optimization challenges where if you don't understand the foundational challenges, googling "fastly do the thing" won't help you ;)

Much like asking an LLM to solve a problem for you.


Most optimization you do as a software engineer is about figuring out what you do not need to do, no math involved.

You aren't going around applying novel techniques of numerical linear algebra.




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