Every few months, a new thread pops up on this site demanding that Codeforces "do something" about AI. Ban Copilot. Detect ChatGPT-written solutions. Add a proctoring layer. Lock down every editor into a walled garden.

I think all of that is missing the point, and I want to make an unpopular argument: the problem was never the tool. It's that half the userbase already doesn't believe in the rating system they're grinding for.

The tool panic is a distraction

Every generation of competitive programmers has had a "the tools are ruining this" moment. Calculators. IDE autocomplete. STL and built-in data structures instead of hand-rolled segment trees. Competitive Programmers' Handbook snippets pasted straight into templates. None of these destroyed the sport. They just moved the skill ceiling up a notch — the people who used to spend rating points memorizing implementation details started spending them on recognizing which implementation to use.

Large language models are the same shift, just faster and more visible. The people panicking about AI in Div. 2 rounds are, ninety percent of the time, panicking about something that was already possible with a well-organized template folder and a search engine. The difference isn't capability. It's that watching someone paste a prompt feels more like cheating than watching someone paste from their own notes, even when the effect on the scoreboard is identical.

The real rot: nobody trusts the number anymore

Here's the part that should actually worry you. Scroll through any "congratulations on hitting [rating]" post and count how many top comments are some version of "ratings don't mean anything anymore" or "half of Div. 3 is just template lookup." That sentiment predates every AI tool by years. It's why smurfing threads get more engagement than genuinely good editorial write-ups. It's why "is CF rating still meaningful for internships" gets asked every single month.

If a huge chunk of the community already treats the rating as theater, then arguing about whether an LLM is "unfair" is like arguing about the seating chart on a sinking boat. AI didn't create the trust problem. It just made an existing crack impossible to ignore, because now the fastest way to fake competence is one text box away instead of requiring actual template-building effort.

What would actually fix this — and why it won't happen

The honest fix isn't a ban. It's radical transparency: publish anti-cheat detection rates, publish how many accounts get flagged per division per round, and stop pretending the current system already catches everything. Most of the outrage comes from people assuming enforcement exists and is failing. The truth is closer to: enforcement barely exists, and everyone quietly knows it.

This won't happen, for the same reason it never happens on any platform with a reputation number attached to it: admitting the scale of the problem publicly damages the perceived value of the number more than quietly ignoring it does. Codeforces has every incentive to let this stay a background hum instead of a headline.

So what do you actually do about it

Stop treating your rating as a certificate and start treating it as a training log. If you're using AI tools to solve problems during practice, you're not cheating anyone — you're just choosing a worse way to practice, the same way copying solutions from tutorials during a virtual contest was always a worse way to practice. Nobody needs to ban that from you. You need to decide you don't want to lie to yourself about what "solving" a problem means.

The scoreboard was never the point. If you needed a banned tool to tell you that, you already knew the answer.

Curious where I'm wrong here — genuinely. Is there a fix to the trust problem I'm missing, or is "everyone quietly knows the number is soft" just the permanent state of any rated system at scale?