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Advent of Code 2025

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Re: Advent of Code 2025

#191

Post by pred_ »

georgehotz wrote: post #100

I support the no global leaderboard. I was in 7th place last year but quickly got bored maintaining the aggressive AI pipeline required to achieve that. If I wanted to maintain pipelines I'd just do work, and there will never be a good way to prevent people from using AI like this. Advent of Code should be fun, thank you for continuing to do it. I'm looking forward to casually playing this year!

So, publicly admitting that you broke the rules and are part of the reason we can't have nice things. Why?

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#192

Post by poulpy123 »

amitav1 wrote: post #131
chongli wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so glad there is no leaderboard this year. Making it a competition really is against the spirit of advent calendars in general. It’s also not a fair competition by default simply due to the issue of time zones and people’s life schedules not revolving around it. There are plenty of programming competitions and hackathons out there. Let this one simply be a celebration of learning and the enjoyment of problem sol…

I agree with the first point but the second point feels irrelevant. Yeah, people's life schedules don't revolve around it, but that doesn't mean shouldn't make iy a competition. Most people who play on chess.com don't have lives that revolve around it, but that doesn't mean that chess.com should abolish Elo rankings.

afai your elo score don't depend of your timezone

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#193

Post by thebytefairy »

tclancy wrote: post #168
f1shy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While is „only“ 12 days, are like 24 challenges. As no leaderboard is there, and I do it for fun, i will do it in 24 days.

Same. I usually try to use it as the "real-world problem" I need for learning a new language. Is there anywhere that people have starter advice/ templates for various languages? I'd love to know - install like this - initialize a directory with this command - here are the VSCode extensions (or whatever IDE) that are the bare minimum for the language - here's the command for running tests

learnxinyminutes.com is a good resource that tries to cover the key syntax/paradigms for each language, I find it a helpful starting point to skim.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#195

Post by crystal_revenge »

the_duke wrote: post #97
jerpint wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a post [0] about this last year, and vanilla LLMs didn’t do nearly as well as I’d expected on advent of code, though I’d be curious to try this again with Claude code and codex [0] https://www.jerpint.io/blog/2024-12-30-advent-of-code-llms/

LLMs, and especially coding focused models, have come a very long way in the past year. The difference when working on larger tasks that require reasoning is night and day. In theory it would be very interesting to go back and retry the 2024 tasks, but those will likely have ended up in the training data by now...

> LLMs, and especially coding focused models, have come a very long way in the past year.

I see people assert this all over the place, but personally I have decreased my usage of LLMs in the last year. During this change I’ve also increasingly developed the reputation of “the guy who can get things shipped” in my company.

I still use LLMs, and likely always will, but I no longer let them do the bulk of the work and have benefited from it.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#196

Post by alexfoo »

losvedir wrote: post #73
gerikson wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If enough inputs are available online, someone can presumably collect them and clone the entire project without having access to the puzzle input generation code, which is the "secret sauce" of the project.

Are you saying that we all have different inputs? I've never actually checked that, but I don't think it's true. My colleagues have gotten stuck in the same places and have mentioned aspects of puzzles and input characteristics and never spoken past each other. I feel like if we had different inputs we'd have noticed by now.

It depends on the individual problem, some have a smaller problem space than others so unique inputs would be tricky for everyone.

But there are enough possible inputs that most people shouldn't come across anyone else with exactly the same input.

Part of the reason why AoC is so time consuming for Eric is that not only does he design the puzzles, he also generates the inputs programmatically, which he then feeds through his own solver(s) to ensure correctness. There is a team of beta testers that work for months ahead of the contest to ensure things go smoothly.

(The adventofcode subreddit has a lot more info on this.)

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#197

Post by forty »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #14

Advent of Code is one of the highlights of December for me. It's sad, but inevitable, that the global leaderboard had to be pulled. It's also understandable that this year is just 12 days, so takes some pressure off. If you've never done it before, I recommend it. Don't try and "win", just enjoy the problem solving and the whimsy.

The "only" 12 days might be disappointing (but totally understandable), however I won't mourn the global leaderboard which always felt pointless to me (even without the llm, the fact that it depends on what time you did solved problems really made it impractical for most people to actually compete). Private leaderboards with people on your timezone are much nicer.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#198

Post by jeroenhd »

IsraelAfangideh wrote: post #45

This will be my first one! My primary languages are Typescript and Java. Looking forward to it!

While part of the fun is doing the daily tasks with your friends, you can still access the previous years and their challenges if you want to continue after advent!

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#199

Post by paulddraper »

mbac32768 wrote: post #115
the_duke wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs, and especially coding focused models, have come a very long way in the past year. The difference when working on larger tasks that require reasoning is night and day. In theory it would be very interesting to go back and retry the 2024 tasks, but those will likely have ended up in the training data by now...

Last April I asked Claude Sonnet 3.7 to solve AoC 2024 day 3 in x86-64 assembler and it one-shotted solutions for part 1 and 2(!) It's true this was 4 months after AoC 2024 was out, so it may have been trained on the answer, but I think that's way too soon. Day 3 in 2024 isn't a Math Olympiad tier problem or anything but it seems novel enough, and my prior experience with LLMs were that they were absolutely atrocious…

Last year, I saw LLMs do well on the first week and accuracy drop off after that.

But as others have said, it’s a night and day difference now, particularly with code execution.

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