I always found it weird when helping people with excel formulas how few people even try to check maths they don't understand, let alone try to understand it.

I struggle to remember even relatively simple maths like working out "what percentage of X is Y" so if I write a formula like that I'll put in some simple values like 12 and 6 or 10,000 and 2,456 just to confirm I haven't got the values backwards or something. I've been shown sheets where someone put a formula in that they don't understand, checked it with numbers they can't easily eyeball and just assumed it was right as it's roughly in their ball park / they had no idea what the end result should be.

Then again I've also seen sheets where a 10% discount column always had a larger number than the standard price so even obviously wrong things aren't always checked.

I don't disagree, but whoever never put math they don't fully understand in their code gets to throw the first stone.

I've reached solutions by trial and error too, and tried to rationalize them later, quite a few times. And it's easier to rationalize a working solution, however adversarial you claim to be in your rationalization.

I don't see using gen AI for the (not so) “brute force” exploration of the solution space as that different from trial and error and post fact rationalization.