Comment by jmfldn
17 hours ago
I see this sort of thing as a mind gym, and staying sharp will help your critical faculties as a programmer. Of course, the specific problems are nothing like the problems most of us solve day to day, but it still has many benefits.
Let's take a hypothetical where we really do all stop reading or writing code, because the models and tooling get good enough. In that scenario I would still argue for this of thing. Studying algorithms gives you a lot of insight and a powerful way of thinking. This class of problems is ultimately about how aspects of software work, so having some familiarity with famous algorithms is part of computer literacy. I'm not saying that you need to be an expert, but struggling to solve a few hard algorithm problems teaches a lot.
As a totally mundane way of looking at this, I treated leetcode the same way for years, where I'd do it for fun and because there was a strange satisfaction in solving some of the harder problems, even though it very rarely had relevance in my SWE day job. Except for very rare occasions where I had to write simple graph algorithms.