ICFPC 2026. Lightning round.

ICFPC 2026. Lightning round.

This year, the contest authors revived an idea from one of the previous contests: they came up with a special 2D graph-based programming language and created a kind of LeetCode for it.

The contest lasts three days, with a lightning leaderboard at the end of the first one. As you can see, our team made it onto the first page.

Of course, I'm doing it with agents, but who isn't? The funniest thing I've heard in the Discord channel so far was: "My friends decided to leave the contest because they ran out of tokens."

I'm very proud that I wrote the first submission entirely by hand. Then came a lot of infrastructure work: downloaders for problem statements, program parsers, submitters for our solutions, and a simulator of the little men's computation process.

By the end of the day, 9 problems out of 12 had been solved. I went to bed and left Codex and Claude with the goals: "submit all unsubmitted problems" and "improve the scores of submitted ones."

To my surprise, they managed to achieve both goals in six hours of work.