Question
A streaming service logs each play as a single string "artist:song" — the artist name, a colon, then the song title (neither part contains a colon, both are non-empty). The same song can be played many times. From a list of such entries, compute for each artist how many distinct songs of theirs were played, and return a dictionary mapping artist to that distinct-song count. For example, ["ada:one", "ada:two", "bea:one", "ada:one"] returns {"ada": 2, "bea": 1} — note the repeated "ada:one" does not raise ada’s count.
songs_per_artist(plays: list[str]) → dict[str,int][["ada:one","ada:two","bea:one","ada:one"]]out{"ada":2,"bea":1}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.