[LeonardoTolstoy]

As a small counterpoint early on I do remember people trying and failing to use LLMs which prompted some of the speculation about the competition being made LLM-proof. As early as I think day 2 there was a big discussion about how no matter what people did the SotA LLMs could not give a correct solution for part 2. After that at least on the subreddit discussions involving LLMs were downvoted intentionally and so while presumably people were doing it there wasn't any discussion on Reddit at least.

I kind of agree with your last point. I try to do all the problems without non-built in python packages myself for exactly the reason you describe. Just feels more satisfying to me.

[tialaramex]

Interesting about the LLMs. I admit I don't read very much early AoC Reddit because I am most likely to be reading if I have questions after a few hours (like, wait, are these huge numbers prime or am I bad at arithmetic? Does my approach work and I screwed up, or am I an idiot and I'm on the wrong track entirely?) and in the first ten days or so I often don't have any questions.