Author here… I wrote it, I used Claude for proofreading/editing as mentioned at the end. Anyway point is, real human here!
I do still read the code _except_ when I am consciously vibe coding a non production thing where I will know empirically that it worked or not by using it.
I’m definitely not using agents to do all my coding (as I hope is reasonably) clear from the post. But they have crossed this line from pointless to try to genuinely useful for many real world problems in just the last couple of months in my experience.
Author of the piece here :-). We are not building coding agents and focused on quite different stuff… I am just trying to share my personal experience as a software person!
Author of the post here… Cool to see this back on HN! I was trying to provide instructions that anyone could use regardless of platform, hence the choice of web tools (both those linked process the data locally). If you know of a base32 decoder that’s easily available on Windows, Mac and Linux I’d be delighted to update the post.
>This year’s Advent of Code has been brutal (compare the stats of 2023 with that of 2022, especially day 1 part 1 vs. day 1 part 2).
I enjoyed completing AoC this year. While it was very clear that day 1 (esp. part 2) was significantly harder than previous years (I wrote about this among other things [0]), OP's claim seemed not obviously self evident when comparing _current_ 2022 stats to _current_ 2023 stats, as folks have had an additional full year to complete the 2022 puzzles.
I grabbed the 2022 stats from Jan 14th 2023 [1] and, indeed, the difference is quite stark. Graphing the part two completion stats[2] for both years, there was a relatively similar starting cohort size on day 1, but 2023 looks clearly harder than 2022 up until day 15. As OP observes, the ratio[3] of folks completing pt1 but not going on to complete pt 2 is way higher for a lot of days in 2023 and suggests the day 5, 10, 12 and especially day 22 part 2s were particularly difficult.
Fun to see this post from the deep archive get some interest - thanks for reading!