It was funny looking at all the obviously chatgpt'd solutions for many of the div 3 problems in the recent contest, primarily problem B, get hacked with TLE. One literally has a comment that said "adding the fix we talked about." But honestly, I just don't get the point in cheating. By the time you are a high enough rating that anyone will care about it, you will have surely either been caught, or exceeded the level that such AI is capable of. I assume most of y'all aren't putting "world rank #17563 in Codeforces" on your resumes. I would think the purpose in doing such contests is to have fun and improve your own skill. How are you supposed to know your own skill if you ask AI for everything? I'm just curious at this point? Why bother doing it at all? If you want AI to help you improve, just ask it for solutions after the contest. Better yet, ask it to explain the tutorials that are nearly always posted after said contest, especially if they are in a language you don't use. I've gotten curious what AI thinks coding solutions work, and they seem to usually be complete garbage, even by my noob standards. (I've mostly tried this to have it try to estimate ratings for problems before the official ratings come out. (And yes, I did this after the contest was over)). By cheating, you just make rating less accurate for both yourself and your competitors. Apple won't care whether someone reaches specialist or expert or candidate master or not. But the people who put actual effort into this site will.

Part of the reason I've enjoyed UIL Academics (specifically in STEM) my entire high school career is that, outside of UT Austin and Turing, no college gives an F whether you are good at it or not. UIL is not something you do to put on your college applications, as seems to be the motives behind far too many high schoolers today. (Chillax there is more to life than college apps.) As a result, the people who reached for the top in UIL Academics were those who did it for the sake of enjoyment, learning, and love for competition. Those who loved to brag about what ivy league college they got into? They rarely made it past regionals. (UIL people, wear your team shirts, not your college shirts. You represent your high school team right now, not whatever college you are going to next year. Looking at you Klein schools. Learn something from Ivan Liu, who has been beating y'all up in math for the last 3 years.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm still relatively new here, I believe the community behind Codeforces to be similar in that regard. Being good at Codeforces, unless you are REALLY REALLY good, does not seem to come with a "prestigious award" or top placement you can brag about to those not in the know, unless you can impress interviewers with the vague sounding "expert" or "candidate master" ranking. Odds are, similar to people in UIL, your talents will be undervalued by those unaware. And that's okay, because that weeds out those who do competition just for the sake of looking good and impressing employers, which unsurprisingly, also weeds out a lot of the cheaters. Contests like that should be protected, and if the unaware don't care how well you do, cheating, even if successful, does literally no one any good.