Whenever there's a change like this, my gut reaction is to grieve and try to imagine ways that things could be kept the same.

After thinking, "maybe puzzles could be designed by a group instead of an individual and they could share the work," I then thought, "and couldn't an LLM help?"

And with that, I had to remind myself: Advent of Code isn't about there being 25 puzzles, and so maintaining volume at all costs has nothing to do with it.

And aren't we so lucky that it isn't! Aren't we lucky to have had the prior 500+ challenges given as gifts over the years! Aren't we lucky to have a great demonstration of humility and care! Aren't we lucky to have 12 new gifts to look forward to this year!

Thank you!

• TeMPOraL

  today at 11:32 AM

  Hate to be the... whoever I'm being right now, but names have meaning. It's the reason to have them in the first place.

  > Advent of Code isn't about there being 25 puzzles, and so maintaining volume at all costs has nothing to do with it.

  It's the Advent of Code. Not "Random late year event with no religious / commercial tradition connotations whatsoever" of Code. The 25 is there in the name. It's the whole point :).

  • bigstrat2003

    today at 12:55 PM

    Technically the event needs to go for a certain number of days, but Advent doesn't mean puzzles must come every day. They can do puzzles every 2-3 days if they want to.

  • kleiba

    today at 12:06 PM

    For Christian Advent to be exactly 25 days long, that would be a coincidence.

    Advent is not the time from December 1st until Christmas, it starts on whatever days the fourth Sunday before Christmas happens to fall on that year. This way, there are exactly four Sundays in advent.

    If Christmas itself should fall on a Sunday one year, it doubles as the fourth Sunday of Advent, i.e., then the first of Advent will be only three weeks earlier.

    • TeMPOraL

      today at 12:11 PM

      All correct. Which is why I said religious slash commercial tradition - Advent is first and foremost just another sales event, and for convenience of sellers and buyers (and their children) the commercial advent got regularized to 25 days, so the stock of calendars that failed to sell last christmas season can be put up to sale in the coming one.

      • kleiba

        today at 12:15 PM

        Agreed, I didn't mean to critique you!

        • TeMPOraL

          today at 12:20 PM

          I appreciate you working out the math above! :).

          (I never could wrap my head around all this. I had enough problems with Easter events, where the math makes a detour through a Lunar calendar.)

          EDIT: And my memory of the Tradition is wrong too, it's supposed to be 24 - as confirmed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710618, and corroborated the two "Paw Patrol" themed Advent Calendars I just found still stashed in my home office.

          • kleiba

            today at 12:30 PM

            The Sunday after the first full moon after March 21st (first day of spring) - what could possibly be confusing about that?!

            j/k ;-)

            • SJMG

              today at 12:55 PM

              Since we're all being exacting here… =p

              > (first day of spring)

              It's actually the March equinox. "Spring" is true only in the northern hemisphere. What's more it's the ecclesiastical equinox, not the astronomical equinox, whose date actually varies depending on the year.

              Never mind that all this is descriptive of dating in countries that grew up with Western Christianity. Countries where Eastern traditions dominate often date it differently.

              All good will to you both = )

            • TeMPOraL

              today at 12:32 PM

              I still find it easier to explain it as "14 Nisan *energetic hand wave*!!" :).

  • today at 11:37 AM

  • zeroCalories

    today at 11:42 AM

    Well, Christmas is cancelled this year I guess :(

    • TeMPOraL

      today at 11:46 AM

      Not necessarily. If they insist on there being only 12 puzzles, all they need to Save Christmas is to start the event on Christmas day, and rename it to "12 Puzzles of Christmas" or "Advent of Three Kings of Code", or such -- see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710963.

      • kleiba

        today at 12:07 PM

        They could also publish the puzzles only every second day, I guess.

        • TeMPOraL

          today at 12:08 PM

          Give a kid half of an advent calendar and tell them to open the window every second day, let's see how long it'll keep their interest (I expect much less than 12 days) :). That's not how Advent Calendars work!

• petesergeant

  today at 9:48 AM

  I’ve been trying to design a puzzle for a game this year that humans can solve but LLMs can’t. I’ve come up with one, but it was hard work! It’s based around message cracking.

  • ekimekim

    today at 9:57 AM

    There was one in a previous AoC that I think stumped a lot of AI at the time because it involved something that was similar to poker with the same terminology but different rules. The AI couldn't help but fall into a "this is poker" trap and make a solution that follows the standard rules.

    • sunrunner

      today at 10:30 AM

      Was that 2023's Day 7 'Camel Cards' [1]?

      [1] https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/7

    • gf000

      today at 10:56 AM

      I mean, wasn't pretty much the second half of all AoC exercises beyond LLM capabilities?

      I remember there being multiple accounts trying to one-shot AoC and all ended on day 10 or so.

      • fud101

        today at 11:22 AM

        since there are a lot of smart ppl here who might like a novel puzzle, i'd like to automatically rewrite any sentence that starts with 'I mean' to be the empty string. It's a huge pet peeve of mine. I'm using Chrome if that matters.

        • dinkelberg

          today at 11:54 AM

          A huge pet peeve of mine is people getting annoyed by phrases like "I mean." :)

        • TeMPOraL

          today at 12:16 PM

          Since a "sentence", much like everything else in practice, is almost but not quite what the formal definition says, just use an LLM for this task.

        • fainpul

          today at 11:41 AM

          I mean, you could just vibe code that.

    • petesergeant

      today at 10:20 AM

      Interesting! Maybe that’s the general way to approach these things

  • Gigachad

    today at 11:22 AM

    Have a look at https://arcprize.org/

    They have hundreds of challenges that humans can solve in under a minute which LLMs can not. Seems the general trend is figuring out the rules or patterns of the challenge when there are few examples and no instructions.

    • petesergeant

      today at 11:35 AM

      Ah, it also needs to be challenging for humans. It's a prize to win something. I just didn't want people to throw the question into Claude Code.

  • huflungdung

    today at 10:33 AM

    How many <$letter>s are in the word <word with $letters>

• thaumasiotes

  today at 10:25 AM

  > And with that, I had to remind myself: Advent of Code isn't about there being 25 puzzles

  Really? The name of the event is "Advent of Code". Having 25 puzzles is easily its most strongly-determined aspect.

  You could argue for 23-29 puzzles, or perhaps for 5, but at 12 what's the name supposed to refer to?

  • bigstrat2003

    today at 12:57 PM

    No, Advent means that it goes for the four weeks prior to Christmas. It doesn't mean "one thing each day" during that duration.

  • matrss

    today at 10:38 AM

    IMO "Advent of Code" only determines the timeframe in which it happens, not the amount of puzzles it must contain. It could just as well be four puzzles, one for each sunday of the advent, or any other amount, as long as they are released within those roughly four weeks before christmas.

    • danielbln

      today at 11:03 AM

      Eh, the implication has always been that it's a Christmas calendar where you open one door per day until it's Christmas eve - just with code riddles instead of chocolate.

      • roetlich

        today at 11:14 AM

        > one door per day until it's Christmas eve

        That would be 24.

  • akho

    today at 10:43 AM

    Twelve nights of Christmas. Would also work better for me, calendar-wise :)

    • ThunderSizzle

      today at 11:11 AM

      That would "require" a timeline shift for it to start on Christmas run until the Ephinany.

      Although I don't think anyone really knows what the 12 days of Christmas are anymore.

      • TeMPOraL

        today at 11:43 AM

        We have a thing called "Three Kings" (aka. "three wise men") in Poland, that falls on Jan 6th. If My Math Is Correct™, there's 12 days between the Christmas day (Dec 25th) and Jan 6th, so maybe the song is about this period?

        • dinkelberg

          today at 11:57 AM

          Epiphany (GP had a typo) and Three Kings is the same occasion, in fact. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_(holiday)

  • eterm

    today at 10:27 AM

    Well advent calendars traditionally had 24 doors.

    • majoe

      today at 12:21 PM

      This lead me done a rabbit hole on wikipedia:

      Advent calendars in their earliest forms were invented approx. 80 years ago.

      The four week advent period goes back to the 7th century and was introduced by pope Gregory I..

A little sad for me because I've enjoyed the global leaderboard aspect for years but of course my second reaction has to be to take a step back and appreciate all the joy that this one man has given us for all these years.

And he's made it clear from that start that he never intended the global leaderboard to be the point, plus AI the last few years messes it all up. All good things come to an end, and I gotta appreciate the good run that we had, and the voluntary work of one person that gifted it to us.

One of the reasons I stopped participating was that as the second half of december was approaching I had less and less free time for solving the puzzles. So to me it is also a welcome change, I will try to finish it again this year.

• rich_sasha

  today at 10:31 AM

  I once has this half serious idea to do "Advent of Parenting", with one problem per month, and you start after Christmas. As in, youre so delayed you start in the New Year, and have time for one problem per month.

  But hey I didn't have the time to do it. Kids...

  • Scarblac

    today at 11:40 AM

    When my kids move out, one of my plans is to finally start the first Advent of Code.

• mid-kid

  today at 11:52 AM

  This. The best I've ever achieved is maybe 15 puzzles on one year, with gaps for the days I missed. And this was when the puzzles were incrementally building upon implementing a bytecode interpreter, which was relatively little work per day.

  Once I miss my first day, playing catch up is an effort in vain, as the puzzles start taking 4+ hours to solve each, solving multiple in one day is a full-time commitment.

  Most advents of code I've fallen off sharply after day 7-10, if not sooner, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this. I think this is a welcome change.

  • zrobotics

    today at 1:00 PM

    Most years, I end up finishing the puzzles in January. Same reason- I end up missing a day due to schedule issues. Since it's just a 'for fun' challenge, it isn't the end of the world if you fall behind a bit. That said, this doesn't work if you are doing this as part of a group.

  • runekaagaard

    today at 12:13 PM

    Yeah, totally this. I've had so much fun with AoC, learning nim, elixir at the same time.

    I would normally tap out around the same place on the first dynamic programming puzzle which just takes me so long to wrap my head around each time (tips anyone? :)).

    I welcome these new changes, and what ever the format are very greatful for all his hard work!

• NoboruWataya

  today at 10:12 AM

  Same, I love AoC but I just never have time for them (December is always the busiest time of year in my job).

  I would have liked if a puzzle was released every 2 days though so it still spanned the whole month. Would be more aligned with the advent calendar concept. In fact in previous years the puzzles have always had two parts so if that format is still being retained there will still effectively be 24 puzzles.

  • emerongi

    today at 10:43 AM

    Spreading the two parts across separate days would be interesting. There would be an extra element of trying to predict what part 2 will be like.

• seabombs

  today at 9:45 AM

  Agree. It was getting in the way of me spending time with the family because I was distracted mulling over the puzzles.

  I had thought last year that they could peak the difficulty around the middle of the month and bring it down a bit leading up to the 25th. But just finishing it earlier is probably better IMO.

• jojobas

  today at 9:46 AM

  Doesn't help that the puzzles become increasingly tricky and you can't just solve them as you sip your coffee anymore (although some apparently can).

If he has cut the number of puzzles in half, why not then release a new puzzle every other day? That would make more sense because AoC would still run until Christmas, and it would give people more time per puzzle. Maybe unlock part 2 of each puzzle the day after the puzzle has been posted, so there still something new every day.

I once tried participating, but gave up halfway through because one puzzle per day was just too much time. If it was one puzzle every two days it would be more manageable.

• akerl_

  today at 11:04 AM

  If they’re released every day for 12 days, you can do a puzzle every other day.

  If the were released every other day, people who wanted to do them for 12 straight days could not.

  • rootlocus

    today at 11:19 AM

    > If the were released every other day, people who wanted to do them for 12 straight days could not.

    If they instead waited 12 days, they could start with the 6 puzzles already released, and then have enough puzzles to solve once a day for the next 12 days.

Awesome!

Yy usual 5-to-7-day output scramble will now look vastly more competent, ah, well, complete. Not actually be smarter, mind you, but radiate the comforting glow of effort by someone who has their temporal ducks in a suspiciously photogenic row.

Improvement? No. But the illusion of improvement? Practically Nobel-worthy. I'm already enjoying this change.

• TeMPOraL

  today at 12:22 PM

  I'm not sure how to parse all this, but I really appreciate the mental image of temporal ducks in a photogenic row. Sounds great for my Star Trek themed, very slow Sunday morning.

  • mkovach

    today at 12:42 PM

    Been toiling with a new client, ingesting their documentation, and improving it with a Hitchhiker's Guide twist, so the next person needs less caffeine and weeps less.

    It is bleeding into other aspects, but it's my pleasure to help with your Sunday morning imagery!

This is completely tangential but as someone who used to be a competitive programmer in the 2010s, I feel like this year marked the end of an era for me.

I don't have time to do regular codeforces/atcoder/leetcode rounds (and the rampant AI cheating is pretty demotivating). So the big annual rituals for me to keep my "competitive programmer" label were: fb hacker cup, google code jam, topcoder TCO, and advent of code. Now besides hacker cup, the rest are dead.

Sad. :(

From FAQ: "Why did the number of days per event change? It takes a ton of my free time every year to run Advent of Code, and building the puzzles accounts for the majority of that time. After keeping a consistent schedule for ten years(!), I needed a change. The puzzles still start on December 1st so that the day numbers make sense (Day 1 = Dec 1), and puzzles come out every day (ending mid-December)."

I see the leaderboard is gone too. Unfortunate but entirely predictable given how the last 2 years went.

That being said, I was worried he'd cancel the entire thing, so this is still good news!

• WJW

  today at 12:52 PM

  The leaderboard has led to the same predictable discussion for as long as the AoC has existed. Recurring themes:

  - The puzzles get published in the middle of the night for most of Europe, can't we have a better system like scoring on <arbitrary other metric the poster likes better>.

  - It's weird that many of the pages say "just have fun, it's not a race" and then also there's a prominent leaderboard page to show who's currently ahead in the race.

  - There's been people taking the whole thing way too seriously from basically year 1, trying to load their puzzle input as fast as possible by polling every 10 ms and putting too much load on the servers.

  - Whether AI is allowed is always a super toxic discussion with no real outcome because you can't enforce it.

• mid-kid

  today at 11:54 AM

  >predictable given how the last 2 years went

  QRD? Was it AI?

On the bright side, this will lead to a more relaxed December schedule. I do not compete for the leaderboard, but trying to solve the puzzles on the days they are released (to keep it in the spirit of an advent calendar), and the puzzles towards the end sometimes take me a considerable chunk of the day to solve, which is tricky to combine with the regular schedule, and may be rather stressful (though still a nicer kind of "stressful", as you get on celebrated holidays).

• sunrunner

  today at 10:45 AM

  This matches my experience, and I've been 'nervously' anticipating this year's Advent of Code. I managed to keep to the spirit last year and get everything done by Christmas day (though admittedly with some days bleeding over into other days due to pesky family/other commitments), but even this relied on having the last week or so of the month be relatively free for me.

  While I've usually been able to do the first half of the month's puzzles in the day before breakfast, over lunch and in the evening, the increasing difficulty does mean that later puzzles can really eat into a day, particularly if you happen to go down a bad path for your solution.

No more leaderboard too!

These look like positive changes, a 2x longer event isn't 2x more fun or 2x more satisfying to participate in.

After skipping the past couple of years, I feel like I'm more likely to give it a go again this year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665217

Big AoC fan these are welcomed changes. I've always started strong but fell off as it was increasingly more difficult to solve puzzles during nighttime. And after you miss one you kinda loose the streak.

This year I'm going to combine it also with mine noaidecember challenge to get a little more dopamine from problem solving.

Last year a lot of the problems were multi steps. Why not just break up the steps and get to 25?

Also after day three I fell hopelessly behind. 12 might be fine.

This is sort of a bummer but as long as Eric feels less stressed and more happy, I'm all for it.

Really appreciate thise changes! Both the reduction in puzzles which means less work, but overall I don’t think it’s going to make the event less fun.

And removing the global leaderboard is good, rather than trying to police how people solve the puzzles just let people have fun on their own boards with people they know.

I've participated in the past, and felt like I always drop off around day 18+ because of holidays etc.

I personally also didn't like when part II of a question felt like a completely new question, instead of a neat extension of the previous one.

I am very happy that this is something that's available to do, for free though. I see advent of code as a good excuse to dabble with a new language, usually with a few people from work.

I genuinely look forward to Advent of Code every year (whatever that says about me) and next year's one is always on my mind, so naturally I'm somewhat sad about this as the one-puzzle-a-day up to Christmas day just felt very neat, and I liked the mostly gentle initial difficulty curve up to the more 'spiky' questions later.

Having said that, having done a few years now I think the following things end up feeling consistent across years:

The first 10-ish (give or take) days were always simple enough that experienced programmers can likely spit them out during their daily standup. This isn't bad, as I think they're great for newer programmers to get a bit of algorithmic and data structure thinking practice, but they can definitely feel a bit same-y once you've done a few years. This isn't a critique of how AoC was structured, just an observation of how it can feel after you've seen a few years. Having said this, I'm sure I'll miss the gentle warm-up this year.

I wonder what this means for the difficulty curve i.e. the almost-inevitable path-finding question will appear on Day 5 and not Day 15?

I'm sure Eric has thought this through but I wonder if an every-other-day approach (perhaps with a 'softer' puzzle for Christmas day itself) would be popular, as I imagine people balancing a job and/or family while wanting to do this might appreciate having two days for the more challenging later puzzles.

On the other hand, free time for this generally does get more tight as you get closer to the end of the month and the puzzles get more challenging, so this approach does just make a chunk of space for people later in the month, and individuals can choose to keep up with the puzzles on release day if they can or just not worry about it and let things roll over.

Unfortunately, I guess I'll have to actually go and see my family this Christmas instead of ignoring the mandatory visits, which seemed like a fair sacrifice to keep up with calendar ;)

> It takes a ton of my free time every year to run Advent of Code, and building the puzzles accounts for the majority of that time. After keeping a consistent schedule for ten years(!), I needed a change.

Completely fair. As Eric says in some of his presentations on this it takes him about three or four months of his spare time, so this is more than understandable. Props to him for keeping this up consistently with his day job for the last ten years.

> The global leaderboard was one of the largest sources of stress for me, for the infrastructure, and for many users.

I don't mind this so much personally (outside of a morbid curiosity in the really fast participants) although I know people that were really invested in it, but there were some genuine points of contention for people that were interested in the leaderboard:

- The global puzzle unlock time, while explained by Eric himself in his presentations, does make being on the leaderboard impractical for people outside of time zones where the actual release time is friendly for that. For me it's 5am, and the only time I ever came even close (while also being nowhere near...) was when I happened to be up at that time due to insomnia (not caused by AoC).

- It sounded like an infrastructural point of pain as the single global release time coupled with submissions-by-country-size and how keen some of the puzzle solvers are makes for a great initial traffic burst with a long tail (also mentioned on the behind-the-scenes videos).

- It naturally favoured people with an interest in these kinds of puzzles, so the selection bias in the leaderboard is inherently skewed towards a) the subset of people that are choosing to do this out of genuine personal interest and then b) the subset of those that are likely to also be interested in competitive programming-type challenges. This is natural, but I think it does make the leaderboard less relevant for the majority of participants.

- The inevitable contention of the use of 'AI' just to be on the leaderboard

Anyway, I'll just end this with a thank-you to Eric himself for designing and running this consistently for the last ten years as it's something I've come to really enjoy, the community is very lucky to have this, and I hope these changes make it possible for him to continue doing this with lower physical costs to him personally and perhaps lower stress for the participants that just enjoy the puzzles for learning and the rare opportunity to write simple programs to solve problems.

For interested watchers:

- 'Eric Wastl – Advent of Code: Behind the Scenes' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oNOTknRTSU

- 'Keynote: Advent of Code, Behind the Scenes - Eric Wastl' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ8DcbhojOw

Edit: Typos

why not a puzzle every two days instead of ending it mid-december?

• exegete

  today at 11:07 AM

  You will have that option

• 0x264

  today at 11:26 AM

  You can definitively play like that if you want to. At day 2n (n > 0) you do the puzzle of day n.

Tryhards ruin everything, part n

Make a fun little christmas calendar to bring joy to the people, get turned into a gamified warzone where people use AI and bots to try to get onto the global leaderboards - possibly because getting on them might net you a job at FAANG

• iamflimflam1

  today at 10:16 AM

  People - the reason why we can’t have good things.

• ozim

  today at 10:29 AM

  Fun part is that world mostly doesn’t really work like that and they don’t really get the job.

• tjpnz

  today at 11:42 AM

  You can put that on your resume and I guarantee nobody will check.

• Udo

  today at 11:35 AM

  I know this is an outsider position, but I always felt that the AoC leaderboard was a mistake. Very few people had the time, the commitment, and the capability of making it on there in a meaningful fashion, and it put an emphasis on something that didn't match the vibe of the event at all. If speedrunning the problem solving was the point, then why package every episode into an enjoyable little story?

  This also ties into the comments that AoC has become moot or was "ruined by LLMs". If you enjoy solving the problems, nothing should have changed for you. What's the difference if a given problem was already solved by an LLM, or a group of IQ 200 superhumans from MIT for that matter?

  As time marches on, there will eventually be absolutely nothing left where an unaugmented human outperforms a machine. That doesn't mean you have to stop enjoying things. In a few years at most, all programming will be purely recreational.

  • robryan

    today at 11:56 AM

    I liked the leaderboard prior to AI. Was fun to click through to various profiles and see who was in there and what their solutions looked like.

• ifh-hn

  today at 10:09 AM

  [dead]

• fjfaase

  today at 10:24 AM

  The temptation to start a competative private leader board will be great, just for the mentioned reason. I have a reference my scores in my CV. The competative part of AoC is one of the things that I find attractive and also has taught me some valuable lessons about coding, like taking some time to review the code the first time before submitting. I experienced several times that I spend of time to debug a small bug due to a minor error, that I could have caught had I spend some time reviewing. Especially with the first puzzles, I try to get it right the fitst time with respect to compiling and execution.

  I will search for a pure C private group to join that only allows a small library for things like reading the input as an array of strings.

  • fjfaase

    today at 12:47 PM

    I have created a private leaderboard which you can join with `1563228-d419ba6d.`

    The basic rule is: you are only allowed to use code you wrote yourself. That does include code you wrote before the start of the contest, for example, standard functions you wrote for earlier AoC editions.

  • 0x264

    today at 11:28 AM

    On your CV ? Has any recruiter or hiring manager ever commented on it, or said the mention gave you an advantage ?

    • fjfaase

      today at 12:51 PM

      No, but I don't care. I guess that most hiring managers do not know what AoC is.

      Next week, I will be 64, and I am no longer searching for a full time job. In the past decade I only worked for 24 or 30 hours per week. I am financial independent and plan to only work freelance if there is some opportunity. Currently, I am not actively searching for a job.

[dead]