Comment by saghm

If I'm understandinf correctly, I don't think what you're saying is quite right. They had a mental model of the algorithms, and then the code they "produced" was completely generated by AI, and they had no knowledge of how the code actually modeled the algorithm.

Knowing the complexity of bubble sort is one skill, being able to write code that performs bubble sort is a second, and being able to look at a function with the signature `void do_thing(int[] items)`and determine that it's bubble sort and the time complexity of it in terms of the input array is a third. It sounds like they had the first skill, used an AI to fake the second, but had no way of doing the third.