Credit: Przemysław Dębiak

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."

The competition required contestants to solve a single complex optimization problem over 600 minutes. The contest echoes the American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced against a steam-powered drilling machine in the 1870s. Like Henry's legendary battle against industrial automation, Dębiak's victory represents a human expert pushing themselves to their physical limits to prove that human skill still matters in an age of advancing AI.

Both stories feature exhausting endurance contests—Henry drove steel spikes for hours until his heart gave out, while Dębiak coded for 10 hours on minimal sleep. The parallel extends to the bittersweet nature of both victories: Henry won his race but died from the effort, symbolizing the inevitable march of automation, while Dębiak's acknowledgment that humanity prevailed "for now" suggests he recognizes this may be a temporary triumph against increasingly capable machines.

While Dębiak won 500,000 yen and survived his ordeal better than the legendary steel driver, the AtCoder World Tour Finals pushes humans and AI models to their limits through complex optimization challenges that have no perfect solution—only incrementally better ones.

Coding marathon tests human endurance against AI efficiency

The AtCoder World Tour Finals represents one of competitive programming's most exclusive events, inviting only the top 12 programmers worldwide based on their performance throughout the previous year. The Heuristic division focuses on "NP-hard" optimization problems. In programming, heuristics are problem-solving techniques that find good-enough solutions through shortcuts and educated guesses when perfect answers would take too long to calculate.

All competitors, including OpenAI, were limited to identical hardware provided by AtCoder, ensuring a level playing field between human and AI contestants. According to the contest rules, participants could use any programming language available on AtCoder, with no penalty for resubmission but a mandatory five-minute wait between submissions.

Final leaderboard results for the 2025 AtCoder World Finals Heuristic Contest, showing Dębiak (as "Psyho") on top.
Credit: AtCoder

The final contest results showed Psyho finishing with a score of 1,812,272,558,909 points, while OpenAI's model (listed as "OpenAIAHC") scored 1,654,675,725,406 points—a margin of roughly 9.5 percent. OpenAI's artificial entrant, a custom simulated reasoning model similar to o3, placed second overall, ahead of 10 other human programmers who had qualified through year-long rankings.

OpenAI characterized the second-place finish as a milestone for AI models in competitive programming. "Models like o3 rank among the top-100 in coding/math contests, but as far as we know, this is the first top-3 placement in a premier coding/math contest," a company spokesperson said in an email to Ars Technica. "Events like AtCoder give us a way to test how well our models can reason strategically, plan over long time horizons, and improve solutions through trial and error—just like a human would."

AI coding on the rise

While OpenAI's assessment of the implications of the contest results may sound optimistically broad, there is no doubt that many AI models have dramatically improved at completing coding tasks over the past few years. For example, Stanford University's 2025 AI Index Report showed that on SWE-bench, a benchmark designed to measure coding ability, "AI systems could solve just 4.4% of coding problems in 2023—a figure that jumped to 71.7% in 2024."

Coding is one of the most frequent uses of chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, and tools such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor have become standard tools for many professional developers, with a 2024 GitHub survey showing that over 90 percent of developers now use AI coding tools in their workflow, although a recent study suggested that AI assistance might not save developers as much time as they think they do.

Even so, as AI models continue to grow more capable at tasks like coding, Dębiak's victory feels less like a permanent triumph and more like a notable data point in a longer trajectory. Unlike Henry's fatal victory, this programmer lived to code another day, though he may find himself racing against an even faster machine next time.

"Honestly, the hype feels kind of bizarre," Dębiak said on X. "Never expected so many people would be interested in programming contests."

For now, that human ability to find unexpected approaches remains unique. But as OpenAI and other companies continue refining their models, future AtCoder contestants may find themselves competing less against AI and more alongside it—or not at all.