It used to be that the value and reputation of coding contest winners was very high. That’s no longer the case. Who cares how fast you can produce code that implements an algorithm or solves a problem? Your competition is no longer other people, at least not by themselves, but AI combined with insightful prompting and good taste.
Historically we wrote all our code ourselves and then we tested it ourselves. Yes, there was a period when we outsourced punching our cards to what was essentially a secretarial pool, but we were still writing out the code and doing all the thinking involved in the programming. Over the years we outsourced some of the testing to a QA department, allowed software to guess at what we were typing and complete it, and allowed code-checking software to run in the background as we typed.
Allowing software to help us by guessing what we mean advanced from word completion to line completion to function completion to program generation over a matter of about a decade. Currently a good model running in a good agent harness or IDE can look at your code, suggest improvements, compile and test the improved code, iterate on that, and then come up with something better, faster, more efficient, and more solid.
