The elegant solution rarely happens on the first try. Many times you need to first arrive at a solution, and then keep iterating on it until it's elegant. Akin to "sorry I didn't have time to write a shorter letter".

IME human developers also span a spectrum on this. On one end, you have devs who might meditate half a day on different solutions before writing a line of code. On the other end are devs who run full speed ahead with the first working solution that comes to mind. LLMs in their current form are mostly the latter.

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