I wonder if a kind of TDD system could work. As in I write a test case and a function prototype, then send it off to a Mechanical Turk type community. Someone picks it up, fills in the details, sends it back. Obviously wouldn't work for some of the more complex parts of the project, but it would save me time from having to build the almost trivial parts.
Yes, but I might not care. If I ask for a function that takes a particular data structure and writes it to a particular file format, as long as it's not in my hot loop, I don't care how badly it's implemented (assuming it works on all my edge cases). On the other hand I might want to make sure it's maintainable or fast enough, in which case I might just write it myself.
But then you better hope that your tests are near perfect and covers every single edge case you can think of (and most of those you can't). For any given collection of tests it is quite trivial to write code which passes those tests but fails on all other input.
