Can Coding Agents Master Printf-Oriented Programming?

Can coding agents understand and apply a programming paradigm they’ve (almost certainly) never seen in training data? Not a standard design pattern, not something from a textbook, but an esoteric hack from an obfuscated C contest: Printf-Oriented Programming (aka POP). The idea is that printf is Turing complete, but can coding agents leverage that fact to write real programs in printf? I tried.…