Advent of Code 2023's new AI/LLM Policy

Seems reasonable

"(If you want to use AI to help you solve puzzles, I can't really stop you, but I feel like it's harder to get better at programming if you ask an AI to do the programming for you.)"

I'd say that whatever "better at programming" is quickly evolving. AI is a tool like high level languages, IDEs, autocomplete or all the different types of code analyzers. How is ignoring a powerful tool like AI going to get you better at programming?

Programmers who think they are better programmers without AI may quickly be replaced with "lesser" programmers who get things done much quicker.

I can't help but feel part of the meaning drops out of it when there are carve outs for tools. If an AI can do it instantly, it starts to feel like pointless busy work, isn't that why we become programmers in the first place?

If your intent is to make it a pure human-keyboard-code challenge, then I would have thought this would be a great opportunity to make the underlying questions harder, or to find the edge cases (in terms of input or question format) where LLMs are no help.

This looks like a good policy to me.

I used ChatGPT (3.5 - 4 wasn't out yet) to help with Advent of Code last year and found it extremely useful - but I was careful not to attempt to make the leaderboard because it felt unfair to me: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Dec/5/rust-chatgpt-copilot/

I think the right context for thinking about the quoted advice is for a person's education. If true beginners didn't ever handwrite a recursion algorithm, a list sorting algorithm, a CRUD application, an assembly interpreter, a neural net forward pass, etc., because they copied the code from an LLM, would they benefit from that? And if it's true for beginners, is there ever a point in one's learning journey where it stops being true and we don't have to learn or practice anything anymore which can be solved by an LLM, or never have to understand new concepts and tools even though the LLM can work with those concepts and tools for us?

I think there's a both-and answer for the contest. Maybe have one competition where the unenforceable spirit of it is, don't use LLMs for help, and another one where the challenges are just made... quite harder... so that even people who use the LLMs still need to marshal great ingenuity to use them better than others (e.g. the #1 spot is someone who used RAG and chain-of-thought better than the #2 spot, and also had better intuition of what to trust vs challenge from the LLM outputs).