[mckirk]

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.