Every day I see a new possibly vibecoded all-in-one CP tool that promises to accelerate one's workflow. Yet they almost all seem to be built by newbies and pupils, whose workflows clearly have not amounted to much.

In the vast majority of my experience, the bottleneck is in my head, not in the tools I have. Perhaps skilled users don't create these things because they don't need them, and the people that do need them are just preparing to solve problems to avoid actually solving problems?

Context

I recently came across this fine gentleman's post celebrating his recent achievement of Specialist. He cited the following things as being helpful for him:

Regular contest participation. Upsolving problems after contests. Learning new algorithms and data structures. Analyzing mistakes instead of repeating them. Staying consistent even when progress felt slow.

Now Vansh_Vala is quite an interesting coder. After looking at his submissions, I was met with many that either got CE or WA on test 1. Amazed, I asked about this peculiar habit of not running his code locally. It is with profound sorrow that I must share the news that, in the midst of our intellectual discussion, he chose to delete the blog post.

An open letter

Dear Vansh_Vala,

I grieve the loss of our discussion and am deeply saddened that you did not reciprocate my interest. I understand that you are a busy man, but, as a lowly Pupil who looks up to you, I hope you'll indulge me for a few inquiries.

First, how did you only solve 2 problems in Edu Round 191? Problem C in that contest was much easier than problems E and F in the most recent Round.

It is odd for you to talk about "consistent" progress and "regular" contest participation when your performance in contests is anything but consistent. Before Round 1103 you had only achieved an expert performance one time, which was 6 contests ago when you performed like 1700+. Then across 4 contests you achieved performances ranging from 700-1400. Now in Round 1103 your performance jumps back up to 1800.

Contrast that with my performance, which climbs steadily by an average of ~100 per contest (excluding early ones). My participations are spread farther apart than yours, yet my performance is far more consistent (and slow). So from a slow improver to an erratic genius, I ask: how did you manage to improve so rapidly, then decline so rapidly, then suddenly improve again? I, too, would like to enjoy this style of growth.

Sincerely,
Your dear friend portajohn

Update: we got him

Although my original suspicions were inconclusive, I am thrilled to announce that the mystery of Vansh_Vala has been solved.

In his organization, Parul Institute of Engineering and Technology, there is a disabled account with the name VanshVala. This account, with practically the exact same username, and in the same organization, is overwhelmingly likely to be him.

Perhaps this account of his was disabled for something other than cheating? The cheater database suggests otherwise:

Finally, the timing is consistent. VanshVala's last visit was 10 months ago. The Vansh_Vala account was created 9 months ago. With this final piece of the puzzle, a crystal-clear story emerges.

Our protagonist Vansh_Vala created this second account after he got caught cheating on his first one. He quickly cheated his way to Specialist, submitting solutions without running them on sample tests, or running them at all for that matter. Then, he made a celebratory post giving advice on how others can also reach Specialist, where he came under the scrutiny of my watchful eye, and the rest is history.

To Vansh_Vala, there is much value in learning algorithms and programming, beyond gaining external validation for the color of your username. I wish you the best and hope you can learn from this.

Signing off hopefully for the last time since I have spent too much time doing this instead of practicing,
portajohn

Every week I see problem organizers thank MikeMirzayanov for this platform, but I am unsure if their appreciation extends to the search functionality. Maybe they are utilizing searches differently; I mainly use it to wait a few minutes for no results.

Currently in the Round 1074 standings it appears as though I made three successful hacks:

However I have submitted only two unique successful hacks. One of my three hacks was a duplicate, with the same input against the same person:

Why is the duplicate counted in the standings? If Round 1074 was a Div. 2 Round and hacks were rated, would the duplicate count towards my total score? If not, why allow duplicates? They make the scoreboard count meaningless, as anyone who can get one hack can get 10.

I want to ask because there is little information on hacks in the contest rules:

Using the Codeforces API, I downloaded data for the entire Codeforces problem set. I plotted the average problem rating of Codeforces Rounds over time:

Interestingly, it seems like Division 4 problems are converging with those of Division 3. At this rate, Division 4 will be as difficult as Division 1 by the year 2058 or by Round 3284!