Depends on the circumstance, and how difficult an appropriate algorithm is to write, but in my experience, if code performance is important, this tends to yield large, painful rewrites down the road.

As the point of the article is to see if Claude can write better code from further prompting so it is completely appropriate to “optimize” a single implementation.

An open source project that doesn’t receive in kind development cost reduction benefit from free contributors should not stay open source.

It doesn’t make sense to people who contribute small hobby projects or work as researchers / are government funded, which means ultimately paid for by businesses and consumers thereof.