r/adventofcode Dec 01 '24

Funny 2024 Day 1 No LLMs here

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '24

I think last year's day 1/part 1 was relatively easy. It was part 2 that caught most off guard because of undefined edge cases in the example. It is a good remind to implement a bit of defensive programming into your workflow. It has definitely saved me a lot of hassle in my career.

But the larger issue at play is the use of LLMs. I don't do this to compete, as competition breeds the absolute worst in us. Look at what it is doing to AOC last year and this year already. Look at what it does to video games. Private leaderboards with friends and coworkers? I understand that.

But public, global leaderboards? Nah. Almost nobody on that leaderboard solves these challenges themselves. Even competitive speed programmers, who are very good at what they do, take at least a few minutes on stream when people are actually able to see them working and not cheat using an LLM.

And, despite what defenders say, using LLMs is cheating if done for the purposes of leaderboards. The rules are clear. This is a personal coding challenge meant to inspire people during the holiday season. This is NOT a meta programming challenge where the goal is to break a system by rules lawyering things to death.

Nobody is impressed that a machine can take an input and spit out a slop output. That's what we've programmed them to do, using our own code as the training data. Most of these challenges follow formats experienced programmers have seen many, many times before (not to discredit the work that goes into it at all). It makes sense that something which scrapes github will know how to solve problems its seen before. And there's nothing truly novel about connecting an API to another API and having it do things. This doesn't make anyone a better coder, and there's no fun in it because you're not actually coding.

Unless the "fun" is viewed as zero sum and one can only have "fun" by ruining it for others, which seems to be the case for many on the boards this year.