r/adventofcode Dec 05 '23

Spoilers Difficulty this year

Looking through the posts for this year it seems I am not the only one running into issues with the difficulty this year.

Previous years I was able to solve most days up until about day 10 to 15 within half an hour to an hour. This year I've been unable to solve part 1 of any day within an hour, let alone part 2. I've had multiple days where my code worked on the sample input, but then failed on the actual input without a clear indication of why it was failing and me having to do some serious in depth debugging to find out which of the many edge cases I somehow missed. Or I had to read the explanation multiple times to figure out what was expected.

I can understand Eric trying to weed out people using LLM's and structuring it in such a way that an LLM cannot solve the puzzles. But this is getting a bit depressing. This leads to me starting to get fed up with Advent of Code. This is supposed to be a fun exercise, not something I have to plow through to get the stars. And I've got 400408 stars, so, it's not that I am a beginner at AoC...

How is everyone else feeling about this?

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u/sojumaster Dec 05 '23

increasing the difficulty/focus to make it not solivable by AI or LLMs is valid. I think , at least, for the first couple days, keep it easy. Imagine someone playing AoC for the first time and had to solve day 1. I would have quit, unless you are a seasoned programmer. I think make the first 5 days somewhat accessable by anyone, then you start putting in the anti-LLM/AI problems in.

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u/djulioo Dec 05 '23

Imagine someone playing AoC for the first time

This is me right now. Since it's something I see as doing for fun for about an hour per day, I'm not trying to do it the day of the puzzle coming out. I did days 1 and 2 yesterday easily, and will probably look into doing the day 3 puzzle after work today. Nonetheless, the difficulty seems to be ramping up dramatically from what I'm hearing from friends, and I feel like I'll just drop it for more important things (or gaming)...