how do you define "golden age"? personally, I still love those kind of riddles, I don't care who's cheating or not. It's like sudoku. and I bet I am not alone.
There definitely are quite a few different ways to participate in AoC, and for the people that are smart enough to just see it as a great opportunity to solve some fun coding puzzles and maybe try a new language, nothing much has changed or will change because of LLMs.
But for those of us who are wired a bit more simplistically, who get up at 5:40am to at least be in a semi-coherent state of mind when the puzzles unlock at 6am because they can't resist the siren call of shiny but meaningless points on a virtual leaderboard; for us it is a bit disheartening to see people solve the challenges in the time it takes us to scroll through the challenge text. And that's what I mean with the 'golden age' being over. It's not a matter anymore of 'well, if I practice competitive coding more and finally get proficient with vim, I might manage to land among the top 100 next year', because next year the official leaderboard might very well be dominated exclusively by people using LLMs.
But for those of us who are wired a bit more simplistically, who get up at 5:40am to at least be in a semi-coherent state of mind when the puzzles unlock at 6am because they can't resist the siren call of shiny but meaningless points on a virtual leaderboard; for us it is a bit disheartening to see people solve the challenges in the time it takes us to scroll through the challenge text. And that's what I mean with the 'golden age' being over. It's not a matter anymore of 'well, if I practice competitive coding more and finally get proficient with vim, I might manage to land among the top 100 next year', because next year the official leaderboard might very well be dominated exclusively by people using LLMs.