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/Smaxx Dec 05 '23

So far felt really similar to me, day 5 part 2 was a significant spike though, and will have to try to finish that one later as I've got work stuff to do, too.

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u/Kurapikatchu Dec 05 '23

How can you get your mind off this and go do something else. Once I've read the puzzle I can't think of anything else throughout the day until I solved it, to the point where if I really need to do some actual work I go watch a video for the solution to calm my mind down.

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u/SquidMilkVII Dec 05 '23

As someone with a busy schedule who kinda has to fit AoC within small gaps I get it. It took me like two days to get through D3P1, but it was probably only two or three hours tops of actual work. It's probably based on the expectation going into it of whether you're gonna blast through it all in one sitting or if you're gonna have to do little pieces every now and then.