The primary reason to not care about AoC leaderboards is that that it penalizes people for being in the wrong time zone. That said, the top 100 or so contributors clearly do care about these things and using an LLM is cheating.

In particular the LLM cheating isn’t just by conjuring a solution: humans don’t get ASCII characters pumped directly into their brain, we have to slowly read problem descriptions with our eyes. It takes humans more than 9 seconds to solve AoC #1 purely because of unavoidable latency.

If people are concerned about leaderboards there are private leaderboards: https://adventofcode.com/2024/leaderboard/private

Personally I don't do it to compete, I just like puzzles.

I did it without AI last year and planning to do it again, for fun.

True. Leaderboards are and always have been full of cheaters.