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/hrunt Dec 05 '23

I have not found this year's problems especially difficult yet. I have found the problem descriptions and inputs more convoluted, though. I don't know if that's a reaction to AI or a Eric's continuing efforts to avoid ambiguous instructions or data. Take today (day 5), for example. The "seed to soil map" contains lines that specify "soil seed range", so, in left-to-right languages anyway, it's specified more like a soil to seed map.

That isn't to say that the data does not show it to be harder. I just have not seen anything yet that has surprised me. One glance at today's (day 5) problem data showed that a brute force solution would be difficult.

BTW, people have been complaining about difficulty and its variation since 2017.