i would expect someone who can write good code in a single pass to be more intelligent than someone who requires multiple tries.

same with anything else really. a better chef can nail a dish in one or two attempts, whereas a worse but persistent chef might take 100 attempts to achieve the same quality.

or likewise, i'm not as good as a basketball player if it takes me 100 attempts to nail a three pointer when an nba player does it 35% of the time - despite both of us eventually achieving the goal.

I’m with you on this. LLM coding agents are incredibly fast, persistent and knowledgeable, and those are all really useful. But they still make a lot of stupid decisions. Without a feedback loop they just go wild. They write tests, which is a form of feedback, but without direction they just grow vast jungles of pointless tests, while the structure of the code itself gets more and more tangled.

Maybe the LLM is smarter than you give it credit for. Maybe the LLM is intellectually humble and self-aware enough to know that even a small code change can easily break something it hadn't thought of.