Advent of Code 2025
(adventofcode.com)1213 points by vismit2000 3 days ago
1213 points by vismit2000 3 days ago
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 solving.
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.
Chess doesn't rank people based on how quickly they complete a puzzle after midnight EST (UTC-5). For people in large parts of Asia, midnight EST translates to late morning / early afternoon. This means someone in Asia can complete each AoC puzzle during daylight hours whereas someone in eastern North America will have to complete the puzzle in the middle of the night.
Not this time:
> The global leaderboard was one of the largest sources of stress for me, for the infrastructure, and for many users. People took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest; some people even resorted to things like DDoS attacks. Many people incorrectly concluded that they were somehow worse programmers because their own times didn't compare. What started as a fun feature in 2015 became an ever-growing problem, and so, after ten years of Advent of Code, I removed the global leaderboard.
Depends how you look at it. Some of my colleagues rave about Claude Code, so I was thinking about trying it out on these puzzles. In that sense it is "going to the gym", just for a different thing. Since I do AoC every year, I feel like it'll give me a good feel for Claude Code compared to my baseline. And it's not just "prompting", but figuring out a workflow with tests and brainstorming and iteration and all that. I guess if the LLM can just one-shot every puzzle that's less interesting, but I suppose it would be good to know it can do that...
i don't think there is a global leaderboard this year. just private ones.
I mean they're great programming tests, for both people and AI I'd argue - like, it'd be impressive if an AI can come up with a solution in short order, especially with minimal help / prompting / steering. But it wouldn't be a personal achievement, and if it was a competition I'd label it as cheating.
> And yet I expect the whole leaderboard to be full of AI submissions...
There will be no global leaderboard this year.
"That's not the right answer; your answer is too low. Curiously, it's the right answer for someone else; you might be logged in to the wrong account or just unlucky. In any case, you need to be using your puzzle input. If you're stuck, make sure you're using the full input data; there are also some general tips on the about page, or you can ask for hints on the subreddit. Please wait one minute before trying again. [Return to Day 1]"
Oh… I’ve never done these “in time” and wondered why the next day problem felt so much easier.
I always put it down to overthinking and never arriving at a solution but maybe it was actually a much tougher problem!
Is it just me, or does it seem to be temporarily down?
Looking forward to it but also sad that it is "only" 12 puzzles, but I completely respect Eric's decision to scale it back.
I've got 500 stars (i.e. I've completed every day of all 10 previous years) but not always on the day the puzzles were available, probably 430/500 on the day. (I should say I find the vast majority of AoC relatively easy as I've got a strong grounding in both Maths and Comp Sci.)
First of all I only found out about AoC in 2017 and so I did 2015 and 2016 retrospectively.
Secondly I can keep up with the time commitments required up until about the 22nd-24th (which is when I usually stop working for Christmas). From then time with my wife/kids takes precedence. I'll usually wrap up the last bits sometime from the 27th onwards.
I've never concerned myself with the pointy end of the leaderboards due to timezones as the new puzzles appear at 5am local time for me and I've no desire to be awake at that time if I can avoid it, certainly not for 25 days straight. I expect that's true of a large percentage of people participating in AoC too.
My simple aim every day is that my rank for solving part 2 of a day is considerably lower than my rank for solving part 1.
(To be clear, even if I was up and firing at 5am my time every day I doubt I could consistently get a top 100 rank. I've got ten or so 300-1000 ranks by starting ~2 hours later but that's about it. Props to the people who can consistently appear in the top 100. I also start most days from scratch whilst many people competing for the top 100 have lots of pre-written code to parse things or perform the common algorithms.)
I also use the puzzles to keep me on my toes in terms of programming and I've completed every day in one of Perl, C or Go and I've gone back and produced solutions in all 3 of those for most days. Plus some random days can be done easily on the command-line piping things through awk, sed, sort, grep, and the like.
The point of AoC is that everyone is free to take whatever they want from it.
Some use it to learn a new programming language. Some use it to learn their first language and only get a few days into it. Some use it to make videos to help others on how to program in a specific language. Some use it to learn how/when to use structures like arrays, hashes/maps, red-black trees, etc, and then how/when to use classic Comp Sci algorithms like A* or SAT solvers, Djikstra's, etc all the way to some random esoteric things like Andrew's monotone chain convex hull algorithm for calculating the perimeter of a convex hull. There are also the mathsy type problems often involving Chinese Remainder Theorem and/or some variation of finite fields.
My main goal is to come up with code that is easy to follow and performs well as a general solution rather than overly specific to my individual input. I've also solved most years with a sub 1 second total runtime (per year, so each day averages less than 40msec runtime).
Anyway, roll on tomorrow. I'll get to the day 1 problem once I've got my kid up and out the door to go to school as that's my immediate priority.
You definitely could do it all in shaders. People have done crazier things.
Not a fan of these "Coding for fun" things. Code for a job to earn money, yes, a side project where there is an end goal, yes. This seems like a waste of time for working developer.
Maybe it's useful for people trying to learn but also becoming pointless now as all Junior dev roles can be done with AI.
I mean do plumbers have an advent of plumbing where they try and unblock shit filled toilets for fun?
I just found in Google (don't worry, SFW)
> I mean do plumbers have an advent of plumbing where they try and unblock shit filled toilets for fun?
Yes, plumbers and other types of craftspeople and technicians do also have these little fun competitions. Why shouldn't they?
I think the reason some of us programmers do these things, is likely because many (myself included) entered the field as enthusiasts and hobbyists in the first place.
>I mean do plumbers have an advent of plumbing where they try and unblock shit filled toilets for fun?
No, but you’ll see it for writers, musicians, and the like.
Engineering (software or not) can be an intellectually rewarding experience for many. I don’t know why some people find this something to scoff at, would you rather have no pleasure derived from your work?
I can't find it, but this question got asked somewhere (Reddit maybe) about 8-10 years ago, and a plumber took the time to respond that many plumbers are actually very passionate about what they do. They don't specifically unclog toilets for fun, but there are plumbers that spend a lot of their free time on plumbing forums, and even some who have projects experimenting with different ways to install certain things.
It's literally just puzzles which have to be solved through code. Solving puzzles is a very normal thing to do for many people
Never got that, I have plenty of "puzzles" to solve in work and life which have real outcomes. I guess Im too utilitarian to enjoy puzzles with ROI.
> mean do plumbers have an advent of plumbing where they try and unblock shit filled toilets for fun?
You've obviously never watched "Drain Cleaning Australia" on YouTube!
Yes, some people find this stuff fun, because they find coding fun, and don't typically get to do the fun kind of coding on company time. Also, there'd be a hell of a lot less open source software in the world if people didn't code for fun.
Let people enjoy things. Just because you don't like that par of your job as much as them doesn't mean they're wrong.
Well, my point, if it wasn’t clear, was that I simply don’t find those problems fun.
I enjoy programming a lot, but most of it comes from things like designing APIs that work well and that people enjoy using, or finding things that allow me to delete on ton of legacy code.
I did try to do the advent of code many times. Usually I get bored half way through reading the first problem. and then when I finally get through I realize that these usually involve tradeoffs that are annoying to make in terms of memory/cpu usage and also several edge cases to deal with.
it really feels more like work than play.
I never understood the craze for "Advent of code". Already at this time of the year the last thing I want to do is code even more.
Well some people like to code and logic puzzles. And especially as it is in its raw form where you can forget all the noise you encounter while coding professionally with many hoops and responsibilities.
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!
It was pretty boring trying to place against aggressive AI pipelines like yours throughout the explicit requests not to use them[1]. I’m sorry to hear it became boring for you too.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241201070128/https://adventofc...
I mean, everyone else was using them too, how can you not? That was the name of the game if you wanted to be competitive in 2024. Not using them would be like trying to do competitive pro cycling without steroids, basically impossible.
Saying everyone else is cheating is not a valid excuse for cheating. It's why aatrong became a pariah, even though he and everyone else was EPO doping.
i felt like that 2-3 months ago, at the east new zealand chess games, when i forgot my anal beads.
The FAQ was pretty clear about not using AI to get on the leaderboard last year.
> Should I use AI to solve Advent of Code puzzles? No. If you send a friend to the gym on your behalf, would you expect to get stronger? Advent of Code puzzles are designed to be interesting for humans to solve - no consideration is made for whether AI can or cannot solve a puzzle. If you want practice prompting an AI, there are almost certainly better exercises elsewhere designed with that in mind.
And yet I expect the whole leaderboard to be full of AI submissions...
Edit: No leaderboard this year, nice!