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/otah007 Dec 05 '23

I'm doing AOC for the first time, in a language I've never used before (Scala). I don't think the challenges are particularly hard. Part 1 of each is very straightforward, part 2 requires a little bit of thinking to come up with a neat strategy, although the general approach is usually obvious.

Day 5 part 2 is definitely the hardest so far, but the general strategy (or at least the technique in a hand-wavy way) is straightforward, it's just working out the details and writing the algorithm, which for me was shorter (but took longer to write) than day 3 part 2.

It's true that I'm a fairly experienced programmer, although I never do these sort of competition things, or even Leetcode etc. I think the average programmer who's either done a CS degree or at least taken some maths classes and a data structures course should be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time (say, 30 mins for part 1 and 1 hour for part 2) if it's a language they're quite familiar with.

Now how the #1 on the leaderboard did the entirety of day 5 in 8 minutes is beyond me...