One reason I didn't enjoy it was that I felt the days don't build on each other well. So you get little code reuse. It was continually changing requirements, so it was especially like work.
In 2019 he built up about 12 challenges using a VM, for Intcode, you had to construct. It was poorly received because without a working version (developed over the first few Intcode challenges), you couldn't solve the rest of them. He hasn't done anything like that since, though I thought it was probably the more interesting series of challenges.
The problem with continuity across days is that the later days can be blocked by the earlier ones, as they were in 2019. That partly defeats the purpose (or structure) of the challenge, where you can mostly pick any day and try it without regard to earlier days or prior years.
I agree that it wasn't completely well-received, and I think this is a real shame. The stated goal of Advent of Code was always to make better programmers. Extending, maintaining, and testing large systems is an important part of real-world engineering efforts.
I thought the IntCode thing was great and I hope to see something like that again this year.
I agree. Intcode was fun, but completely destroyed the promise of skipping a day and still having fun with later puzzles. I didn't come to enjoy it until much later.
Most years I've skipped a couple days and revisit them later. Usually just because I give myself 1-2 hours limit to avoid staying up too late working on them, and unless it's the weekend I don't always have time during the next day to wrap them up. No reason to stop just because of a single blocker.
I can understand that. I think it just points to that the challenge is not for me. It also comes at a time when I desperately want a break or to work on my own projects, software or otherwise.
There's a lot of potential code reuse between years; whether that's good or bad is up to you, I think. (I would personally prefer if my Chinese remainder theorem solving function got less use, but it seems to be called for every year or two.)
