Ah December. It's cold, it's dark, we're half way through the year's Christmas hype, and Advent of Code begins again.

This year's Advent of Code has two significant changes. There's no global leaderboard, and there are just 12 days of challenges rather than the usual 25.

The former doesn't matter to me. I'm not sure I've ever looked at the global leaderboards before and it's not something I'd ever come anywhere close to ranking on. Typically I end up completing challenges a couple of days late — especially after a weekend — and I never complete all 25 anyway. Looking at last years statistics, apparently the highest rank I ever achieved was 15246. Suffice to say that the global leaderboard never held any interest. We do have a private leaderboard for GitHub employees, but it doesn't seem to be a particularly competitive endeavour.

Dropping from 25 challenges to 12 is fantastic though! I'm sure that the difficulty will still ramp up in the same way — meaning I'll still probably drop off about half-way through — but frontloading all the challenges at the start of December means I'll likely have a bit more time to dedicate to them anyway.

In previous years I've used Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn more about functional programming by leaning on Rambda for my solutions. This year, however, I've chosen to forego the self-flagellation of spending 40 minutes a day cramming TypeScript into a pipe() and instead I'm keeping it vanilla.

Of course, I don't use AI at all for the challenges. Honestly it's been a nice change actually writing 100% of the code again and, when I'm stuck, ending up on MDN or Stack Overflow rather than having Claude tell me what a great question I asked for the thousandth time.

If you want to follow along, I post all of my solutions on my dedicated Advent of Code site.