Why use AI for Advent of Code? 🕯️

I wonder how many people participants in the popular coding competition Advent of Code have Copilot turned on. I personally use Copilot during daily programming and find it helps me as a very smart autocomplete. But I turned it off during Advent of Code. Why?

First of all, the the rules ask you to. Primarily, that request is for competitive programmers who aim for the official leaderboard. But as Eric, the creator of AoC, also says:

If you want to use AI to help you solve puzzles, I can’t really stop you, but I feel like it’s harder to get better at programming if you ask an AI to do the programming for you.

I’m not a competitive programmer, but I find having an an AI suggest solutions would take the fun out of the puzzle solving. Stretching your mind and figuring out how to solve the puzzles are the entire point of Advent of Code. Otherwise you lose the opportunity to sharpen your mind and coding skills.

And what do you gain from using AI? Did you manage to solve puzzles faster, or solve puzzles you otherwise would not have been able to? Congratulations. You proved that you are able to ask someone/something else to solve a problem for you. *slow clap*. Just remember, if you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it.

You also cannot really compare your solution or the time it took to reach it with others. You are not competing the same league. It is like googling answers during a pub quiz.

With that said, it is perfectly fine to ask for help if you fail to solve a puzzle. But first make an honest attempt. Otherwise, you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.