FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter

Slightly off-topic: I have an honest question for all of you out there who love Advent of Code, please don't take this the wrong way, it is a real curiosity: what is it for you that makes the AoC challenge so special when compared with all of the thousands of other coding challenges/exercises/competitions out there? I've been doing coding challenges for a long time and I never got anything special out of AoC, so I'm really curious. Is it simply that it reached a wider audience?

Personally it's the community factor. Everyone is doing the same problem each day and you get to talk about it, discuss with your friends, etc.

I think the corny stories about how the elves f up and their ridiculous machines and processes add a lot of flavor. It is not as dry as Project Euler for example, which is great in its own right. And you collect ASCII art golden stars!

I have only had some previous experience with Project Euler, which I liked for the loop of "try to bruteforce it -> doesn't work -> analyze the problem, exploit patterns, take shortcuts". (I hit a skill ceiling after 166 problems solved.)

Advent of Code has this mass hysteria feel about it (in a good sense), probably fueled by the scarcity principle / looking forward to it as December comes closer. In my programming circles, a bunch of people share frustration and joy over the problems, compete in private leaderboards; there are people streaming these problems, YouTubers speedrunning them or solving them in crazy languages like Excel or Factorio... it's a community thing, I think.

If I wanted to start doing something like LeetCode, it feels like I'd be alone in there, though that's likely false and there probably are Discords and forums dedicated to it. But somehow it doesn't have the same appeal as AoC.

For me, it's a bunch of things. It happens once a year, so it feels special. Many of my friends (and sometimes coworkers) try it as well, so it turns into something to chat about. Because they're one a day they end up being timeboxed, I can focus on just hammering out a solution or dig in and optimize but I can't move on so when I'm done for the day I'm done. It's also pretty nostalgic for me, I started working on it in high school.

Community plus problem solving in low stakes fun setting.