I can't help but feel that with this, the 'golden age' of AoC is over, because the overlap between coding puzzles that LLMs can solve in seconds and puzzles that humans enjoy solving in their free time during advent has become too large. One suggestion on reddit, where people discussed this issue, was to get rid of the global leaderboard entirely, and only have smaller private leaderboards, maybe even with moderation that could deal with the blatant cheaters. But that would also be kind of sad, since this idea of global competition definitely was part of the AoC charm, at least for the competitively motivated people. We'll see where it goes next year.
For now though: Thanks Eric, if you read this, for the years of joy AoC has brought (and hopefully will continue to bring) to so many people :)
But for those of us who are wired a bit more simplistically, who get up at 5:40am to at least be in a semi-coherent state of mind when the puzzles unlock at 6am because they can't resist the siren call of shiny but meaningless points on a virtual leaderboard; for us it is a bit disheartening to see people solve the challenges in the time it takes us to scroll through the challenge text. And that's what I mean with the 'golden age' being over. It's not a matter anymore of 'well, if I practice competitive coding more and finally get proficient with vim, I might manage to land among the top 100 next year', because next year the official leaderboard might very well be dominated exclusively by people using LLMs.
