this shit hasn't been fun for almost as long as it's been around.

Before AI, you would have high-strung retards on adderall basically frying their brains hyper-optimizing for the niche application of solving programming puzzles in record time, streaming themselves doing it, literally anything it took to get on the top 100 leaderboard so they could link their githubs because people were being hired off the leaderboards and so it became a desperate race to the bottom, nobody was doing it for fun anymore, long-time users started to drop out after they started re-using puzzles and obfuscating them by making the prompts confusing as fuck, the difficulty ramped up in interpreting what was being asked rather than knowing what elementary data structure/algorithm they wanted you to implement, it became a high strung humiliation ritual.