Advent of Code 2025

Published December 01, 2025

For the past decade, Eric Wastl has put up, every December, a coding challenge called Advent of Code. Up until this year it has consisted of a new challenge every day for 25 days. The goal is to use your programming skills to solve a problem. Most are 2 part problems - you solve the first part and then receive the modified problem for the second part.

For the past 3 years I have taken part in this exercise. It's a fun way to flex some skills that I don't often get to play with. Many of the people who do this try to do it in multiple languages, or they pick a language that they're either trying to learn or haven't used in a while. I have (so far) done them in Python, just because it's the language I'm most comfortable with.

This year's challenge started today (the puzzles open at midnight EST with the first one on December 1 and then every day following until they've all dropped.) This year there are some changes:

1. It's only going to be 12 days and not 25. This is for the very simple reason that putting it together is a lot of work and, while it may be a labor of love, it is one that Eric volunteers to do and he has decided that 25 is too much.
2. There are no more global leaderboards. This is due to too many people trying to use LLMs to solve the problems quickly without actually doing the work themselves.

Now that you know what it is, I'm going to let you go and try to have some fun with it yourself. If you want to see my solutions you can go to my AOC GitHub repo and check it out.

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