I heard from a coworker who does Advent of Code every year that there is now drama. I don’t do it, but it always seemed like a friendly group puzzle-solving activity like Wordle, except harder. Each day, you get a programming problem, and you solve it (or not) and share your code.
What’s the difference between this year and all of the previous years? LLMs.
The guy who runs AOC said people can’t use LLMs to qualify for the leaderboard. Weirdly, people got very angry about this and vowed to use LLMs. And of course, decided to harass AOC’s founder.
Now someone who consistently placed in the top ten has been pushed down to the seventies, and people who no one’s heard of are dominating the leaderboard with “amazing” times.
I have to say, programmers have always been problematic people, but they’ve gotten shittier over time. The money is the problem, as it often is.