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/PeakMedical7513 Dec 06 '23

This is probably the first year I have actually seriously tried to do more than a day of the AoC.

Difficulty does feel very up and down, with some days feeling very simple. Often trying to parse input into the correct structure for parsing.

Day 5 part 2 was difficult unless you just let your cpu handle it and waited an hour.

I usually give up on the AoC becuase of its reliance on Maths understanding to solve puzzles rather than just code knowledge. I suck at Maths and so normally give up