alt Hacker NewsIn case anyone was wondering, the IOCCC specifically permits LLM use in their guidelines.
"The IOCCC has a rich history of remarkable winning entries created by authors who skillfully employed various techniques (often their own tools) to develop their code."
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This primarily affects the judges who are opening themselves up to potentially a flood of shoddy code, but given the nature of the contest, I suspect they are very good at differentiating interesting code from low quality code.
I think it's great that IOCCC accepts code that might have been built with machine assistance, because it makes the purely handcrafted winners seem even more valuable.
So it turned into an LLM-gymnastics competition?
Rule 7 would be self-contradictory if "tools" include AI.
https://www.ioccc.org/2025/rules.html
It seems to refer to custom code generators. Why would they mean AI if they explicitly talk about a "rich history" (when AI wasn't available)?
I'm in the no-AI camp, but for this case, I find it interesting, especially since there's little obfuscated C online, and LLMs cannot infer intention from the actual code. Did you spot any entries with LLM support?
Also, the reverse is interesting: how well can they guess the function of the obfuscated code?