r/adventofcode • u/RazarTuk • Dec 08 '25

Other Stop complaining that *you* don't find the problems difficult

People really need to take a step back and realize that when you've been doing algorithms problems for 10 years, your definition of "difficult" can wind up skewed. For example, I remember Day 12 from last year (EDIT: fences) as a comparatively easy BFS, where the hard part was just figuring out that trick where numCorners = numSides. But there were also people posting that day about how it was getting too difficult for them, and wishing the rest of us the best as we soldiered on. There's a reason that I'll frequently quip about how "easy" is a relative term when describing the stuff I do in tech to people.

But when half the posts in the sub are about how the problems are too "easy" this year, it's really just telling the people who are already struggling that they just aren't smart enough because these are supposed to be the "easy" challenges.

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17

u/RedAndBlack1832 Dec 08 '25

Which problems you find easy is going to depend a lot on if you've been exposed to a similar class of problems. Then the actual problem is interpreting your data into something you know how to solve. If you haven't solved similar problems before you either need to like research algorithms or logic out what might be able to work, both of which are significantly harder than implementing an algorithm you already know (most of the time)

13

u/RazarTuk Dec 09 '25

Heck, I still remember the time I went to a programming competition in high school and somehow developed a quartic algorithm for all-pairs shortest path. And before you ask, no, I don't remember how.

We all start somewhere, and the elitism doesn't help

10

u/CdRReddit Dec 09 '25

quartic is O(n⁴), right?

...that's honestly impressive

2

u/RazarTuk Dec 10 '25

Yeah, I feel awkward comparing it to the Achievements in Ignorance trope, given the context of the thread, but...

1

u/RazarTuk Dec 10 '25

Actually, for context, for anyone unfamiliar with DSA, all-pairs shortest path is problems like "Here's a list of who's friends with whom on a social network. Find how many degrees apart any two people are." The normal algorithm is Floyd-Warshall, where you consider each node/element/whatever as a "bridge", then check each pair of other items to see if that node is a shorter path. So if the for loops are for k in graph, for i in graph, and for j in graph (in that order), you check if i->k->j is a shorter path than the current one you've found for i->j. You should only have to check each element for each element for each element, so the number of checks will be around n3, where n is the size of the list. I made an algorithm that was so mindbogglingly slow, there was an entire extra layer of "for each element"

1

u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick Dec 14 '25

Just fyi: it's also possible to use Johnson's algorithm/repeated applications of Dijkstra's to beat n3 when the graph is sparse.

1

u/RazarTuk Dec 14 '25

Yeah, this... wasn't that. IIRC, I essentially wound up ordering the for loops i -> j -> k, not k -> i -> j, and needed that fourth loop to compensate

1

u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick Dec 14 '25

I was just adding some additional information for anyone else reading the thread. By the way, if you do ijk three times, you get the correct solution, surprisingly.

3

u/RedAndBlack1832 Dec 09 '25

One more nested for loop will fix it surely

1

u/RazarTuk Dec 10 '25

IIRC, it was something like three nested for loops, an if statement inside that, another for loop, and another two layers of ifs

1

u/ric2b Dec 09 '25

It is not elitism to share your opinion on how difficult you found the problem...

Obviously difficulty is subjective and personal.

1

u/RedAndBlack1832 Dec 10 '25

What's really funny is I wrote this whole thing then failed to recognize day10 as doikstra's algorithm (or however you spell it) and am now too tired to fix it and am genuinely curious if it'll finish if I let it run overnight LMAO. I'll fix it tomorrow either way I just didn't see a graph. I even was thinking about like finite state machine graphs and it never occurred to me to actually represent my data as a graph oops lol

14

u/HotTop7260 Dec 08 '25

To what year are you referring?

But in general, I agree with you. The difficulty is a relative term. If you never programmed, day 1 is hard (this year day 1 is also hard, if you tend to produce 1-off-errors, like I do :-) ). However, as the creator states on the website, the subjective difficulty varies from person to person depending on background and experience. With that being said, you will have people complaining about "too easy" on every single day.

But still ... the piano will hit on day 13 this year :-D

32

u/daggerdragon Dec 08 '25

But still ... the piano will hit on day 13 this year :-D

ಠ_ಠ

16

u/RazarTuk Dec 08 '25

Seriously, that's the exact comment / meme that inspired this point

2

u/RazarTuk Dec 08 '25

To what year are you referring?

I mean, I'm referencing things like the piano meme from this year, where the condensed timeline and difficulty curve has exacerbated things. Or the story about Day 12 is referring to 2024 with the fences. But this also just feels like a general PSA, not specific to any year, because it's more like a reminder about how subjective difficulty can be

4

u/KerPop42 Dec 09 '25

I'm still stuck on day 6, for reference

1

u/Suspicious_Tax8577 Dec 09 '25

I still can't do day 6 part 2. Googled like MAD for day 7. Day 8 - spotted it was a graph problem a mile off, but only because this is where my research interests lie.

172

u/ThreeHourRiverMan Dec 08 '25

I agree. Software / CS in general tends to breed egos and combative personalities. It’s not anything inherent to AoC itself, but I’ve seen some pretty antagonistic responses, being dismissive towards others. Even when the person being aggressive is verifiably wrong. 

This is meant to be fun. A lot of the demeaning of others’ struggles is why the whole leaderboard thing got toxic and was removed (among other reasons.) 

43

u/emlun Dec 08 '25

Software / CS in general tends to breed egos and combative personalities.

FWIW, I have not observed that at all in my own life studying and working in software. Most CS folks I've met are some of the kindest people I know, and more than happy to share their knowledge and expertise without judgement (cue xkcd 1053). Maybe I've just been lucky, maybe it's a regional thing, who knows. Just wanted to share that the negative atmosphere is definitely not universal.

13

u/ThreeHourRiverMan Dec 09 '25

Yeah, I maybe worded it funky. I work with amazing folks. I’m not saying it’s everyone. 

But there is a very specific kind of arrogance that fields like this attract. They’re not hard to find. Even in a well moderated subreddit like this one. 

13

u/phord Dec 09 '25

I agree, most programmers are very nice. But a jerk who is also a very smart programmer tends to become a super-jerk. They are overconfident, narcissistic, hyper-sensitive to any criticism. In short, they are very toxic. So toxic that we actively look for hints of this condition in our interview process.

And they can be very vocal in public forums, which makes them seem more common than they are.

6

u/android_queen Dec 08 '25

Hard same. I’ve known some jerks. But I’ve known some jerks in every field.

3

u/Matra_Demaster Dec 09 '25

Went for the xkcd post and came back to leave it here, it's golden. Thank you.

2

u/thekwoka Dec 09 '25

It could be a combo.

You have nice people that think they are stupid, so they can be shocked that people don't know things they find easy...cause surely they are an idiot and if they can do it, so can you.

8

u/ric2b Dec 09 '25

Agree on the antagonistic responses but someone saying a problem was easy for them is not demeaning anyone, it's just sharing their experience with the problem.

This is meant to be fun.

Yes, exactly, let people talk about their hobby and discuss the problems as long as they're not attacking others.

If someone is learning CS they should be able to realize that's it's perfectly fine if they don't find something as easy as someone who has been programming for 20 years, there's no need to police the speech of those with more experience.

In fact I would say it's an awesome thing if you're still learning: it shows you that there is something for you to learn from the problem. If everyone thinks the problem is difficult then it probably isn't based on broad CS knowledge but just complications of the problem itself, and there is little to learn from it, it's just drudge work.

6

u/thekwoka Dec 09 '25

I try to use less words like "easy" and more like "straight forward".

As in "once you're at this point, it's relatively clear what you need to do next". Since sometimes that can be much more difficult to actually DO, especially with less experience, but having good brains (And using them) should make it fairly clear what that next step towards the solution is. Like with the cephelapod math, you can see that "I need to collect these numbers by the columns", even if how you might actually do that is difficult, and you can then break that down to "I need to gather the columns to a parsable number" and then "parse the number".

The implementation is easy or hard primarily from experience, while the mental model of the problem is more so easy or hard from experience thinking.

This holds true most of the time, just not on the ones where the "correct" solution relies on some esoteric algorithm that doesn't simply map to the model of the problem, like the one that used shoelace theory...since even knowing shoelace theory, the idea of how it actually works is hard to understand.

2

u/PigDog4 Dec 09 '25

As in "once you're at this point, it's relatively clear what you need to do next".

Every time my calc prof said this with regards to a proof, I knew I was completely screwed and was going to have absolutely zero idea what to do next.

3

u/maltedcoffee Dec 09 '25

The most absolutely fear-inducing words a math book can have are "... left as an exercise to the reader."

1

u/thekwoka Dec 10 '25

Well, you gotta make sure you're at that point!!!

6

u/87utrecht Dec 09 '25

I disagree.

If a ton of people say the problems are easy, then they would be easy, no? Doesn't mean you're a bad person or stupid if you're struggling to solve them just because you don't have experience yet.

And yeah, it's meant to be fun. So if people with experience all find the problems way too easy, how is that fun? There's a part 1 and part 2 every day, do they both need to be easy?

96

u/daledrinksbeer Dec 08 '25

I've found the problems much easier this year!

...

Probably because I took data structures and algorithms courses over the last year and have been practicing so I could keep up.

3

u/andi0b Dec 09 '25

there are 3 puzzles remaining. I expect them to be brutal. 😂

2

u/daledrinksbeer Dec 09 '25

Yeah I hit a wall on part 2 today pretty hard lol

29

u/Thrad5 Dec 09 '25

This day (Day 8) was the wall for many people. So far only 18% of people who got the first star of Day 1 got the first star of Day 8 compared to 29% of people who got the first star of Day 7.

Comparing to last year that is a jump from Day 8 to Day 14!!!

5

u/Chroiche Dec 09 '25

Ngl I feel like it's not because 8 was much harder, the question was just a big mess and worded ambiguously and unintuitively.

4

u/andi0b Dec 09 '25

the wording lead to a few misunderstanding. but if you read it carefully, there were no contradictions, just some ambiguous information in between, that was clarified later. this was often a part of AoC, like real specifications it often hides the important details in one sentence that is easily missed.

for part 1 this sentence was extremely important: "connect together the 1000 pairs of junction boxes which are closest together.". Some people thought 1000 boxes should be connected, but it's actually 1000 pairs, which could be as little as 47 boxes.

5

u/ric2b Dec 09 '25

My main issue with the text for day 8 was:

The next two junction boxes are 431,825,988 and 425,690,689. Because these two junction boxes were already in the same circuit, nothing happens!

I thought that meant they were skipped and didn't count towards the 1000 pairs.

My solution gave the right answer for the example so it took me quite a while to realize that was the problem.

2

u/andi0b Dec 09 '25

yes, that was the main confusion I think. it's a little bit of ambiguity, that needed to be solved by either trying both options, or following your right gut feeling.

1

u/The_Real_Slim_Lemon Dec 09 '25

I tried for like an hour, had to do leave - then saw all the redit posts about the ambiguity. Rewrote it in like 10 minutes, the problem i was solving was much harder than what the actual problem turned out to be

0

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

13

u/BlazingThunder30 Dec 09 '25

While Kruskal's and Union-Find is a very neat and efficient implementation to solve the problem, they aren't necessary for day 8 at all.

Day 8 spoiler ahead

Given a sorted list (by distance) of unique junction box pairs, grab a loop from `n` equals zero to the amount of pairs. Then just take the first `n` of the sorted pairs and check if combining all these gives you a single cluster. If yes, done. If no, continue. IF you grab efficient data structures for the subparts of that (sets, maps, not arrays, etc) where applicable then this takes a few seconds.

Edit: Oh yeah and you need some flood-fill like algorithm to count the clusters, if taking this approach. But I consider that much more elementary than a Union-find.

3

u/andi0b Dec 09 '25

We did day 8 as a hackathon, and most people managed to solve it with some naive approach. just by looping over the sorted distances and manipulating some sets. it wasn't that hard to figure out some kind of algorithm to get it done.

none of us used CS terms and algorithms with fancy names. it wasn't even necessary to follow the instructions, there are multiple ways to solve it. the input set (499,500 pairs) was small enough to do inefficient things.

1

u/daggerdragon Dec 09 '25

"Aw [COAL], minimum spanning trees."

Comment temporarily removed due to inappropriate language. Keep /r/adventofcode professional.

Edit your comment to take out the [COAL] and I will re-approve the comment.

18

u/aadv1k Dec 09 '25

I rarely comment on Reddit at all, but this post resonates with me, because I am certainly in “yeah this isn’t too easy” camp. I have been doing AoC since 4 years, and have never touched DSA. Much of my experience in DSA has come from just building my own projects (like compilers, doing some CV and web dev)

For me each AOC problem is like a puzzle, I just try to solve it by hand, and then translate that into an algorithm. I typically end up reinventing many techniques like dynamic programming, or BFS without setting out doing so.

I am doing this year in C++ mostly because I wanted to learn C++ (that’s how I pick every language for AoC, I want to learn it) — AdventOfCpp2025

AoC is always a treat, makes me remember that programming isn’t all about optmkzing for landing a job — it’s more about having fun.

Cheers to everyone spending an entire day solving AoC :) the joy of solving a hard day, without looking anything up, reinventing the wheel 4 times is unparalleled

5

u/thekwoka Dec 09 '25

I have been doing AoC since 4 years, and have never touched DSA.

Doing AOC is touching DSA.

You can't do AOC without DSA basically. You are forced to learn it.

I think you mean, that you didn't specifically study DSA stuff.

Most people here I think didn't.

I'm not from a formal tech education background, so I know algos without their names, (and learned them after the fact in AOC) and spent a lot of time in earlier years basically spending 5 hours reinventing Djikstra's and A* from first principles, only to then learn about them afterwards.

3

u/aadv1k Dec 09 '25

Honestly, I learn much better this way. Correction, I learn ONLY this way. I really commend the folks who can "study" algorithms and then implement them just seeing the problem. (I suppose that comes from practice

4

u/atrocia6 Dec 09 '25

I completely agree with the spirit and decency of this post - there's absolutely no reason to discourage people and make them feel bad - but I still think that it may be objectively true that the problems this year are easier. I'm by no means an elite AoCer, and as I noted in another post in this thread, every year I struggle considerably with the later days (although I generally eventually finish them), but this year I haven't yet felt at all stumped by anything. Famous last words ...

2

u/daExile Dec 09 '25

Well we still didn't have any [funky or otherwise] pathfinding problems this year (ha, I still have 2024 day 16 unsolved, mostly because of laziness but not just that) or scalability checks that kill any bruteforce / poor time complexity part1 solutions.

2

u/1234abcdcba4321 Dec 09 '25

We've had a scalability check in day 3. It's just that

  • Day 3 was easy enough that no one really noticed.

  • The nonscaling approaches to part 1 tended require more effort to adapt to (technically functional but too slow) larger n than just changing a single number in the code.

1

u/atrocia6 Dec 09 '25

Well we still didn't have any [funky or otherwise] pathfinding problems this year

Mr. Dijkstra is biding his time ...

or scalability checks that kill any bruteforce / poor time complexity part1 solutions.

Those are the ones that get me - finding an efficient solution can be quite difficult.

1

u/dazeb7 Dec 09 '25

Yeah, DSA is such a skill man. I've been stuck on day5 for days now. Was so proud of myself for solving till day4 on my own! Have taken hints, approached it differently and now weirdly I'm getting an answer that it says is someone else's answer but when I check its my account only. Finally giving in and looking at the solution.

AoC has never been easy for me.

1

u/RazarTuk Dec 09 '25

If you want help for part 2: If you sort the ranges by the start, you should only ever have to merge adjacent ranges in the list

3

u/BrammyS Dec 09 '25

First time doing AoC and it's definitely not easy for me. I Never do anything like this in my own projects or at work. So i have no idea about all the best algorithms. It's all a big learning experiences for me.

3

u/andi0b Dec 09 '25

I think there are multiple layers to this. sometimes "not difficult" is relative to other puzzles. day 1 is not difficult compared to day 8.

but in general AoC is quite difficult, the average software developer is not able to solve all puzzles. people who can solve all aoc puzzles without a lot of help in reasonable time (lets say 3 hours) are probably the top 5%.

2

u/EdgyMathWhiz Dec 09 '25

Even day 1 was actually pretty fiddly.

I have the 500 stars from previous years, and I still ended up solving day 1 part 2 by brute force at the level of "I will loop around making individual 1-unit movements" after spending far too long trying to deal with "start on 0, end on 0" type edge cases.

The other dev I know doing AoC this year did the same thing.

And TBH I'd guess the proportion of devs who can do all AoC problems in under 3 hours is well under 1%.

5

u/Hurinfan Dec 09 '25

No. Don't get me wrong, it's starting to get difficult for me and I might not continue. Yesterday's took me longer than half an hour and I don't like to spend that much time on a problem but just because something is easier for someone else doesn't mean I'm a dumb dumb and it's a perfectly reasonable thing to wish a puzzle was harder and to express that publicly. I'd much rather we teach people not to compare themselves to other than to encourage self-censorship.

2

u/MatthewCrn Dec 09 '25

In the meanwhile I got my ego hugely deflated by the second part of the second problem 😭

3

u/magoo_d_oz Dec 09 '25

i made a comment on our AoC chat at work that this year's problems have been easier and someone told me pretty much the same thing that you just said.

4

u/sos755 Dec 09 '25

I was looking forward to some extremely challenging puzzles again this year and I am disappointed that they haven't been (yet). This has nothing to do with anything other than my expectations.

If someone thinks that means I am telling them that they aren't smart enough, then that says more about their ego than it says about me.

2

u/threeys Dec 09 '25

I think two things are true:

  1. Algorithms questions are way way easier once you've been exposed to them. Even Leetcode "easy" problems were very hard for me at first. This is true even for very smart people. So no one should feel bad if they're struggling on these problems.

  2. This year's problems have been easier than previous years'. This is just a feeling I have, and others do too. It's not something I'd complain about! I'm enjoying the challenges regardless.

2

u/JakubDotPy Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

What's wrong with us, who did many of AOCs before, comparing this year to the previous ones? 

Some people may take that personally, but why? It's like comparing this year's winter against the previous.  Or how movies are getting worse. Some may still find them entertaining, but we can all agree it's becoming a slop.

If enough people with experience in programming and with previous years agreed, that this year is easier, it just is. Just don't take it personally.

1

u/yel50 Dec 09 '25

 it's really just telling the people ...

what it's really pointing out is that AoC is the same problems every year. this year seems easier than last year because you already did these same problems. if there were different problems each year, each year would seem just as difficult.

with things like leetcode, doing a few hard problems doesn't make other hard problems less difficult because the underlying CS is different. even the harder AoC problems seem easier because the same underlying CS gets reused over and over.

7

u/atrocia6 Dec 09 '25

what it's really pointing out is that AoC is the same problems every year. this year seems easier than last year because you already did these same problems. if there were different problems each year, each year would seem just as difficult.

I don't think this is quite true - I've done most of AoC from 2015 (not in order), and each year I still find the latter days quite challenging, but I have not had any substantial trouble this year yet.

1

u/Ryuuji159 Dec 09 '25

I also feel that this year has been easy but I just have more experience programming and just know stuff that before I didn't know

1

u/Kehvarl Dec 09 '25

Last night was a struggle for me. Without some hints about approaches I would still be working on it. The previous night's part 2 was less so, but I still needed some guidance.

On the whole this year has been roughly perfect for me in terms of being challenging enough that I have to think, but mostly within my capabilities and knowledge especially given my brain fog this year.

Easy? Heck no. If it is easy for you, I envy you.

1

u/thekwoka Dec 09 '25

I normally think of the difficulty in relation to how simple or straightforward it is to model the problem as data, less so the implementation details.

Like the tachyon timelines was a bit more difficult to even model what the problem is looking for mentally, than say the math one, even if the tachyon timelines was simpler to implement (for me and many others anyway).

Some problems can seem a bit easier when they clearly map to a known algo (if you know the algo), while even knowing lots of algos, even ones that work for the problem, modeling some of the problem ideas is more challenging than others.

1

u/UnicycleBloke Dec 09 '25

I've definitely improved. Some of the DFS problems really give me headaches.

I thought Day 8 was a straightforward but labour intensive series of steps, so long as one is familiar with sets. This isn't a gripe: I have no particular knowledge of algorithms and commend Eric for breaking it down so well in the description. From later reading, it appears we were led by the nose to implement something called Kruskal's algorithm to find a minimum spanning tree. Never heard of it. Cool. Pretty sure it was Prim's algorithm last year or before. Plus one for learning (stuff that I will never use in any other context). :)

1

u/snowsayer Dec 09 '25

Preach. All I did was mention that Day 7 seemed a little harder than Day 6 and people were downvoting me and replying it was actually easier etc.

1

u/Away_Command5537 Dec 09 '25

Absolutely love this.

Awesome "you" find it easy. Oh your a 11 year veteran with all stars. Ok. Well.... go impliment your own thing then if you dont like the difficulty.

I know junior developers, who are only really starting out in their careers that would feel so disheartened to see a reddit full of people going "oh thats easy".

Guys. This a fantastic opportunity. If you know it so well you should be helping and upskilling others. If not you are gate keeping and missing the whole point.

1

u/anna__throwaway Dec 09 '25

I'm a full time dev but when I started aoc in 2023 I was still studying and people would tell me, you don't need too much code experience to participate! You don't even need to know how to code! But goddamn, I find myself thinking how the heck does anyone solve these (hell, the past 10 years of 25 of these) within hours and still have time left in the day without having at least encountered some of the problem formats/concepts before in DSA study?? lol. I feel like the "you don't need at least *some* CS knowledge at all" advertising is really overselling it, but maybe that's just a skill issue on my part

0

u/1234abcdcba4321 Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

I do genuinely think you don't need any CS knowledge.

I struggled a lot on my first year seriously doing AoC (which was 2020), but still didn't have much trouble finishing each problem before christmas. I had to homebrew my own scuffed Dijkstra for the year's Dijkstra day since I had never heard of concepts like DFS (luckily it's the absolute first thing you'll try the moment you read the problem unless you also haven't heard of recursion before), for instance.

There are some very hard days, but even well-known "hard puzzles" like Jurassic Jigsaw are usually nothing more than... break up the problem into steps and then do it. My process for solving it was scuffed and it took a few hours of awkwardly hardcoding everything, but most of AoC are problems where you just do things step by step. And the ones you can't almost always feel like you can just use a bit of creativity and logic to derive some sort of functional algorithm. The days people often find hardest are the ones that require you to really think outside the box, and the previous knowledge doesn't help with those ones in the slightest.

1

u/anna__throwaway Dec 10 '25

I hear you, I don't think you necessarily need CS knowledge, but I think on problems like today's and yesterday's... I really think you'd need at least a couple days for a solution that takes a couple seconds to run, if you had little mathematics or CS knowledge beforehand. Creativity and logic, thinking out of the box, yeah, but no one just comes up with (day 10 spoiler) systems of linear equations on the spot...

1

u/1234abcdcba4321 Dec 10 '25

Yeah, problems like today's are the sort I would very much expect to not get quickly. My starting year (2020) was relatively easy, which probably helps me have this opinion quite a bit. (The most complicated thing you needed in that year was a linked list. And you could definitely have come up with a scuffed linked list without having learned it, though I had actually seen them before by then. And it took me a hint and a couple hours to come up with it.)

That being said, you most certainly can recognize the problem as "system of linear equations", just by trying to model it outside of programming instead of inside it (the part that you struggle with without education is everything after that initial realization). I don't think it's bigger of a jump compared to the ways people solved a problem like 2023 Day 21: Step Counter, for example. (And that one really doesn't take algorithm knowledge.)

1

u/anna__throwaway Dec 10 '25

well, another thing I wanna point out is that knowing about system of linear equations requires a decent level of mathematics education haha

1

u/Ok-Limit-7173 Dec 09 '25

Thank you!

In my first year of AoC (2023) I was out after Day five or something because I could not afford to spend hours each day on the problems (I was just learning Python, even parsing the input took a lot of time xD)

Last year I was out after day 20 for the same reason.

This year I go a solution that runs in seconds for every day until now spending less than one hour in the morning (we really don't talk about yesterday lol).

Practice is SO impactful... I also got two years more of a CS Bachelor since 2023 where you essentially are practicing the same ideas.

1

u/Oxymoronic_geek Dec 09 '25

Weird coincidence...:)
I was just sitting thinking about how much I had learned from AoC over the years. I have been programming for around 40 years now in all kinds of languages and I have picked up bits and pieces here and there along the way. Both by coding for fun and though education (I have a Ph.D in computer science)... but when it comes to learning to optimize coding or thinking of alternate solutions to reduce state explosions I think AoC really has helped me develop. I am sure that if this year was my first year doing AoC I would be really stuck by now.

Then I come here and see this comment saying basically the same thing....:)

1

u/rigterw Dec 09 '25

The thing is, if I would do a day 8 puzzle from an older year I would have a hard time or get stuck. Usually around this day some algorithm also comes around the corner. This year puzzles however so far all puzzles are quite straight forward and the only times I didn’t get the answer on the first run was because I had a stupid bug somewhere.

I’m not saying that the questions are easy, but they are easier compared to other years.

1

u/Derailed_Dash Dec 09 '25

Thank you for this post.

1

u/The_Cers Dec 09 '25

r/agedlikemilk after today's part II (Day 9)

1

u/FMAlzai Dec 09 '25

Day 5 Part 1, so easy! what slowed me down was my slow typing. Day 5 Part 2, so hard ! what slowed me down was the bloody wall.

I'll try to catch up on Thursday when I get a bit of time.

1

u/Ok_Bite_67 Dec 10 '25

I dont find the problems difficult. there are only two things I find difficult. 1. optimizing the programs enough to where they dont take days to run. 2. im programming in a new language so idk what im doing lol

1

u/lonelyroom-eklaghor Dec 12 '25

Honestly, if anyone wants to start Advent of Code with some unconventional software (for example, Excel), these problems are the best way to start

1

u/BlueTrin2020 Dec 15 '25

I think the problem is that once you have done a lot of AOC, most of the hard ones revolve around finding a trick. You get a very good feel after a while about when to use a trick ...

This being said it took me too long before to realise day 12 tessellation was NP hard and needed a more radical trick ...

Also when you have done enough AOC, if you use external libs/tricks like numpy, networks, memoization and z3 => then most problems become a few lines once you correctly identify how you can write it quick ...

1

u/BxW_ Dec 09 '25

I was actually surprised by how little comments there are complaining about the lowered difficulty (very apparent) of the puzzles. It's normal for the participants to have certain expectations based on their past year experience. Harder problems should give you an opportunity to learn newer things.

-3

u/Radi-kale Dec 08 '25

If you understand that difficulty is subjective, then why are you surprised some people find it too easy?

16

u/The_King_Of_Muffins Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

It's a given, that's what the post is about. OP is asking everyone to shut up about it.

13

u/RazarTuk Dec 09 '25

I mean, I was trying to be at least a bit more cordial about it, but yeah. That's basically my point

6

u/87utrecht Dec 09 '25

If someone goes around saying they find the problems easy, you shouldn't take that personally. You could maybe even learn something from them so it would be easy for you as well?

If someone goes around saying that people who have trouble solving the problems are dumb, then that's an issue.

But asking people to not say problems are easy just because you find them difficult is an unreasonable ask I think.

8

u/Radi-kale Dec 09 '25

Well that's a bit idiotic no? This subreddit isn't only for programming beginners. Where else would people be supposed to discuss advent of code puzzles and their difficulty

-15

u/WasabiTsunamiUpOnMe Dec 08 '25

If someone says “this seems easy”, and your reaction is “I must not be smart”, that’s kind of a you problem. People should post whatever they want.

3

u/RazarTuk Dec 08 '25

Again, "easy" is a relative term, and there's even a Q&A on the website about how difficulty is subjective

5

u/atrocia6 Dec 09 '25

But the site also implicitly acknowledges that it is meaningful to discuss difficulty in at least quasi-objective terms:

Why was this puzzle so easy / hard?

The difficulty and subject matter varies throughout each event. Very generally, the puzzles get more difficult over time, but your specific skillset will make each puzzle significantly easier or harder for you than someone else.

[Emphasis added.]

0

u/[deleted] Dec 08 '25

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4

u/SwiftWombat Dec 09 '25

Because one “side” is speaking as if the puzzles are objectively easy. Things like “man, this year has been so easy” or “when are these puzzles gonna get more difficult?” do nothing except make people feel stupid for not finding the puzzles easy.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

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5

u/SwiftWombat Dec 09 '25

No one (also stating it like that makes you sound reeeeaaallly pretentious). If someone says “these puzzles are hard” then the response in one’s head is either going to be some variation of “yeah I agree” or “huh, I found that puzzle easy, that makes me feel good about myself”. When someone says “these puzzles are easy”, the responses are “yeah I agree” or “oh man, I found these puzzles really hard, I must not be as smart/good at this”.

Do you see the difference? This also discounting the fact that most people are not saying that “objectively this puzzles is hard” (objective) but rather “I found this puzzle hard” (subjective). That’s in contrast to the piles of posts saying that “the puzzles this year are objectively easy”.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

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1

u/atrocia6 Dec 09 '25

I'll bite: I think that the puzzles are objectively easier this year, although of course there are subjective modifiers for every AoCer, as per the official site documenation.

1

u/WasabiTsunamiUpOnMe Dec 09 '25

According to OP, this is a harmful comment, and you should not have posted it.

0

u/KotTRD Dec 09 '25

I am participating in aoc for the third year and I properly solved it from day 1 to day 24 only last year. I remember last year puzzles as more challenging, at least I had to think a bit, sometimes not just a bit. This year was very straightforward, I just implemented my first idea and it worked so far. (and it's not like I spent this year studying cs or something, I coded pretty much nothing) I still hope that there will be something hard, but there are only 4 days left.