> I'll probably always write an obviously correct version first

I’m not usually so confident in my own infallibility, so I prefer to think of it as “I might get this wrong, the LLM might get this wrong, our failure modes are probably not very correlated, so the best thing is for us both to do it and compare.”

Agree it is always better for the human engineer to try writing the critical code first, since they are susceptible to being biased by seeing the LLM’s attempt. Whereas you can easily hide your solution from the LLM.

> I’m not usually so confident in my own infallibility

I'll concede that point, but let me put it differently: when I write the "obviously correct" version, what I mean is that I can explain what every line of code is supposed to be doing. I can say what the expected result would be, at each step and test it.

When the LLM writes an inscrutable version for me, I might be able to test the final result, but I'll never know if there are corner cases (or not even that) in between where it will go spectacularly wrong. If I have to untangle what it's written to get that kind of confidence, then it's going to take me much longer. Reading code, especially somebody else's, nevermind an alien's code, is just so much harder for me.