> I'm utterly mystified by folks who are interested in making the leaderboard or even solving AoC puzzles with AI assistance
This reminds me of the Project Euler position on people posting their solutions publicly. The assumption is others would seek them out, get credit they don’t deserve and not learn as much.
I understand trying to prevent skewing the results, but personally it doesn’t affect me since I’m not doing it to compete in the website, I’m doing it for self edification.
I believe this actually helps me compete in the thing that really matters, getting a job, bringing high quality products to market and generally solving real problems people have.
Are LLMs starting to solve some of that? Sure. So then I want to compete for the jobs that still can’t be solved by them and involve more complicated and interesting solutions.
If people want to handicap their problem solving abilities or compete for jobs supervising boilerplate generation, all the better for me. I’ll take a hopefully more rewarding career over making the leaderboard on AoC and PE. Though I do feel sorry for their maintainers.
> Is it fun to hit <tab> over and over?
It’s probably a mixture of entertainment (I’ve seen countless apps where it looks like people just tap the screen as fast as possible without even really watching what’s going on) and imagining they’re learning something by watching answers appear (although IMO the lack of engagement leads to lack of retention; sort of like Socrates’ position on reading vs discussion).