If I recall, the AIME answers are always 4 digits numbers. And most of the problems are of the type where if you have a candidate number it's reasonable to validate its correctness. So easy to brute force all 4 digit ints with code.

tl;dr; humans would do much better too if they could use programming tools :)

uh no it's not solved by looping over 4 digit numbers when it uses tools