I'm nowhere near the leaderboards, but I have built some tools that do things like scaffold the files for a solution and automatically fetch the input file. I i

I'm nowhere near the leaderboards, but I have built some tools that do things like scaffold the files for a solution and automatically fetch the input file. I imagine the guys competing for the top spots are doing similar things, automating as much as possible. Another thing is having utilities and libraries that are well suited for solving puzzles, I have a whole module in my repo that implements a 2d-array style structure (in elixir), which I've been able to use on 6 or 7 puzzles. So there are ways to increase your speed other than "just be really fast at coding" (although you definitely need that too if you're trying to get up the rankings!)