Advent of Code 2025

Post by ab5tract » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 8:45 AM UTC

llmthrow0827 wrote: post #290

deergomoo wrote: post #225

> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.

It's totally true. I was doing Advent of Code before I had any training or work in programming at all, and a lot of it can be done with just thinking through the problem logically and using basic problem solving. If you can reason a word problem into what it's asking, then break it down into steps, you're 90% of the way there.

Post by suddenlybananas » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 8:53 AM UTC

randomifcpfan wrote: post #260

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/

Current frontier agents can one shot solve all 2024 AoC puzzles, just by pasting in the puzzle description and the input data. From watching them work, they read the spec, write the code, run it on the examples, refine the code until it passes, and so on. But we can’t tell whether the puzzle solutions are in the training data. I’m looking forward to seeing how well current agents perform on 2025’s puzzles.

Post by rdos » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 9:15 AM UTC

mynameismon wrote: post #2

Is it just me, or does it seem to be temporarily down?

Post by greener_grass » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 9:34 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #285

deergomoo wrote: post #225

> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.

On sorta the same topic: In the programming world I feel like there's a lot of info "for beginners" and a lot of folks / activities for experts. But that middle ground world is strange... a lot of it is a combo of filling in "basics" and also touching more advanced topics at the same time and the amount of content and just activities filling that in seems very low. I get it though, the middle ground skilled audience…

Post by fragmede » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 9:39 AM UTC

SilverSlash wrote: post #308

fainpul wrote: post #20

Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).

Is Rust still "non-mainstream"? Because it's extremely well suited for AoC. The ergonomics of a high-level language with the performance of C++.