Why is the ARC challenge difficult but coding problems are easy? The two examples they give for ARC (border width and square filling) are much simpler than pattern awareness I see simple models find in code everyday.
What am I misunderstanding? Is it that one is a visual grid context which is unfamiliar?
We have an enormous amount of high quality programming samples. From there it's relatively straightforward to bootstrap (similar to original versions of alphago - start with human games, improve via self play) using leetcode or other problems with a "right answer"
In contrast, the arc puzzles are relatively novel (why? Well, this has to do with the relative utility of solving an arc problem and programmer open source culture)