A Polish programmer running on fumes recently accomplished what may soon become impossible: beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a head-to-head coding competition. The 10-hour marathon left him “completely exhausted.”
On Wednesday, programmer Przemysław Dębiak (known as “Psyho”), a former OpenAI employee, narrowly defeated the custom AI model in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo. AtCoder, a Japanese platform that hosts competitive programming contests and maintains global rankings, held what may be the first contest where an AI model competed directly against top human programmers in a major onsite world championship. During the event, the maker of ChatGPT participated as a sponsor and entered an AI model in a special exhibition match titled “Humans vs AI.” Despite the tireless nature of silicon, the company walked away with second place.
“Humanity has prevailed (for now!),” wrote Dębiak on X, noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. “I’m completely exhausted. … I’m barely alive.”
I have yet to have an AI write code of more than one or two lines that doesn’t have a breaking bug. Speed isn’t useful if it’s broken. And honestly I usually spend more time debugging AI code than I would have just writing it myself. It’s nice sometimes for getting an understanding of syntax of a system I’m not used to, but beyond very generic scripts that don’t depend on context, it’s pretty useless in my experience. I have Copilot integrates with my IDE for work and it’s more trouble than it’s worth so far. Even just for code completion, the IDE does a better job most of the time even if it suggests much smaller chunks at a time. And the smaller chunks are actually better if I have to proofread every single word either of then outputs anyway.