Comment by another-dave
10 hours ago
I think there's different levels to look at it.
If you know that you need O(n) "contains" checks and O(1) retrieval for items, for a given order of magnitude, it feels like you've all the pieces of the puzzle needed to make sure you keep the LLM on the straight and narrow, even if you didn't know off the top of your head that you should choose ArrayList.
Or if you know that string manipulation might be memory intensive so you write automated tests around it for your order of magnitude, it probably doesn't really matter if you didn't know to choose StringBuilder.
That feels different to e.g. not knowing the difference between an array list and linked list (or the concept of time/space complexity) in the first place.
My gut feeling is that, without wrestling with data structures at least once (e.g. during a course), then that knowledge about complexity will be cargo cult.
When it comes to fundamentals, I think it's still worth the investment.
To paraphrase, "months of prompting can save weeks of learning".