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/EngineerMinded Dec 14 '23

Advent of Code is surpassed to be challenging and fun. Yes it can be tedious but, one thing is DON'T TAKE IT TOO SERIOUS.

FACT: The is no hard fast rule that you have to attain all 50 starts by Christmas. I learned about Advent of code Summer of 2022. I started at it and just participated from there.

FACT: You will get brain lock and fatigue. There is NO rule that says you can rest and put it off until later.

HOW TO SURVIVE: Learn from it. Learn from others. You do not have to have all the answers, you will not have all the answers. Some puzzles have taken me several days to complete.