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Comment by sputr | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else feel dread over this? I gave up on AoC knowing this would happen. And I don't even care about the competitive part.

All the AI news lately has made me ever more uneasy, like for the first time in my life I actually feel like the future of being mad entirely obsolete by AI may actually happen in my lifetime.

I've started avoiding AI news.

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That's... not a universal reaction. People still play Chess and Go even though the best AIs for both games are superhuman (and have been for Chess for quite some time now). And for AoC in particular, most people aren't particularly interested in their place on the global leaderboard, and Eric Wastl (who writes the puzzles) is... bemused and a little bit squicked by the people who are. (See, e.g., remarks on "why do AoC" in this talk: https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/adventofcode/)

It depends what's the purpose behind what you do. Writing software is a fun and creative puzzle solving process, AI will never replace that. It's the same with all AI generated content. It's impressive to see, but if you create things because you like doing so, AI can't steal that from you. It can be one of the many tools that helps creating things though and as such it can have an impact more on the business side.

What AI is doing is the same thing other advances that have made things easier have done. Previously the differentiator between who could build software was who understood the coding process. But now at least to some level the differentiator is going to be do you have ideas for things to create and implement. Can you think of a design to do it and have a good eye for beauty etc.

Definitely. And I've been largely skeptical about overhyped AI promises in the last 5 years.

I'm feeling very uneasy and not sure what to make of all of this.

If you don't care about the competitive part of AoC, why does this make you give up on it? Seems like if you don't care about the competitive part, this wouldn't affect you in any way?

Yes, this could be the beginning of the end of the competitive part of AoC. And maybe even of all online programming contests.

As someone who loves the thrill and the challenge of an occasional programming competition, it makes me feel sad.

I started programming to do exactly that. Don’t understand your perspective.

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