Love AOC. Finished all puzzles last year and the year before that. Used it as a way to learn Python (coming from C/MATLAB/R). However this year I found the puz

Love AOC. Finished all puzzles last year and the year before that. Used it as a way to learn Python (coming from C/MATLAB/R). However this year I found the puzzles way too finicky, after about day 5-6. Was taking way too long to load the problem into my head. Perhaps I had greater mental bandwidth in previous years, this year work + growing kids was top of mind. I don’t mind problems that take a long time to think about, and/or take a long time to work through, trial and error, change approaches, etc. What I do mind and what drove me away from AOC this year is that the problems seemed so detailed in ways that seemed arbitrary and ad-hoc, I didn’t have the motivation to spend the time required to load the problem into my head.