Question
Hourly foot-traffic counts for a store need light smoothing before display: each hour should show the busiest count among itself and its immediate neighbours. Interior hours look at three values; the first and last hours have only one neighbour and look at two. Given the counts in hour order, return the smoothed list. Example: [1, 5, 2, 2] becomes [5, 5, 5, 2].
smooth_counts(counts: list[int]) → list[int][[1,5,2,2]]out[5,5,5,2]State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.
Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.