Day 5 serves up two courses: a quick taste test to check whether each ingredient is fresh according to ranges of fresh items. Then a hearty main where we reduce overlapping ranges of the fresh items and identify how many unique ingredients are included. We manipulate the input into integers for …

Day 4 boils down to counting and then repeatedly removing rolls of paper that have fewer than four neighbouring rolls. A small Grid2D helper plus a couple of concise functions are all you need. We will go over the rule for a roll being accessed, show how to parse the grid and inspect eight-way …

Day 3 builds a number from digits by picking a subsequence with the largest possible value, and the same greedy approach powers both parts. We will unpack the problem requirements at a high level, then walk through a compact Python solution that selects the maximum value subsequence per digit …

Day 2 of Advent of Code 2025 is a satisfying dive into pattern detection over numeric ranges, starting with pairs of repeated digit sequences and then generalising to any number of repeats. The Python solution below uses straightforward string slicing and chunking to get the job done with clear, …

Day 1 of Advent of Code 2025 is a neat exercise in modular arithmetic, where you track a circular dial and count how often it hits zero. Part 1 counts only the zeros landed on at the end of rotations, and Part 2 upgrades that to count every click that passes through zero mid-rotation too. In this …

Adding a human-in-the-loop step to a LangGraph flow is an easy way to improve quality and control without adding branching or complexity. In this post we will build a tiny three-node graph that drafts copy with an LLM, pauses for human feedback, and then revises the draft, using LangGraph’s …

Advent of Code 2025 is almost here, and this year I am aiming squarely at speed and optimisation across all 12 puzzles using Python and UV. I will publish a short post every day covering the approach and performance choices, and you are very welcome to join in using whichever language you want to …

The next rules to implement for the Sudoku solver are called wing rules. There are a few of these rules used in solving Sudoku, but some are hard to identify and are for very advanced solves. The two needed to solve most Sudoku puzzles are called XY-Wing and XYZ-Wing:

• XY-Wing uses a pivot cell with …

Style guides are not bikeshedding; they are seatbelts that stop simple edits turning into catastrophic bugs. The infamous #gotofail incident shows how a tiny deviation from a basic rule like “always use braces” can undermine critical security checks, and how automated style enforcement …

Day 7 of Advent of Code 2024 boils down to testing all left-to-right operator choices between fixed numbers and summing the targets that are achievable, and a compact base-k iterator in Ruby keeps both parts small, clear, and fast. You can browse the rest of this series under Advent of Code. The …

Conditional edges let your LangGraph apps make decisions mid-flow, so today we will branch our simple joke generator to pick a pun or a one-liner while keeping wrap_presentation exactly as it was. In the previous post we built a two-node graph with joke_writer and wrap_presentation, and now we will …

LangGraph makes it easy to wire simple, reliable LLM workflows as graphs, and in this post we will build a tiny two‑node graph that turns a topic into a joke and then formats it as a mini conversation ready to display or send. By the end, you will have a minimal Python project with a typed JokeState …