Something that I watch every year with AoC is the drop-off curve of completed days as the days go by. Typically, there is a super sharp dropoff in players at first, that kinda levels out near the end to just the people are are really in it for the long haul... In previous years only about 5% of the initial players are paying by Christmas Eve. But if tools like Copilot are actually useful in solving harder problems (not automatically like today's GPT solve, but as a tool for even experienced users to help flesh out ideas) then I wonder if that dropoff curve will change, allowing more people to go further than before. Somehow I don't think so.
From personal experience, the drop off isn't due to difficulty, but rather "free" time as we get deeper into the holiday season -- travel, family, disconnecting, etc.
The difficulty certainly plays a role in how much "free" time is needed to participate. If early problems can be solved with a quick 10 minute script, later problems take the top 100th person about 1-2 hours -- which means it takes mortals like me about 4-8 hours to solve.
That's quite the difference, and is due to the problem difficulty.
