Yeah, it's one of those "yes but no" kind of things. I at least partially disagree with myself here.

I think it's more complex than just trial-and-error being a waste of time, though.

For one thing, it makes the learning curve for a beginning program a lot easier. Over time, it will generally lead to better coding, simply because "this is what finally ended up working last time so I'll do it first this time". Expert systems work almost exclusively that way, and they can do amazingly complex things once they've self-educated enough.

At the same time, that low barrier-to-entry has the drawback of a lot of junk software being used for critical business functions, where it often isn't really appropriate, but nobody knows better. There's no way to tell what the cost of that is.

But I tend to think it's more of a positive than a negative, based on my own experiences in learning coding and databases. Universal rule on it? Nah. But my opinion does tend towards it being more positive than not.