If you think the era of human programmers is over, stop – this news is for you.
At the recent AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 coding championship in Tokyo, a Polish programmer, Przemysław "Psyho" Dębiak, defeated OpenAI's Advanced AI in a 10-hour coding marathon.
What happened in this competition?
The ISS competition featured 12 top human coders and a special OpenAI's AI model ('OpenAIAHC').
Everyone was given the same hardware, no extra help was allowed.
The most difficult optimization problem is given, which cannot be solved by a normal ready-made program — it requires shortcuts, guessing and creativity.
For 10 hours, everyone had to get a robot's path on the grid in the most efficient moves.
AI lost, why?
AI is superfast in coding, but relies only on logic and a brute-force approach.
"Psyho" used its creativity and intuition—things that AI models can't fully copy yet. Human tweaked his approach to the last minute, guessed it, and took shortcuts from the experience.
Result: Human's score was 9.5% higher than AI's!
What did the winner say?
Dębiak himself admitted that he was "completely exhausted"—he slept 10 hours in just 3 days, but he beat the AI. They say,
"Humanity has prevailed (for now)!"
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also openly tweeted and congratulated the winner.
What does this victory mean?
This competition was a kind of human vs AI face-off. And this time the man won.
Experts are saying that this may be the last time humans have been able to beat the entire AI. AI skills are improving with every contest, AI will be more likely to win in the future.
But this moment showed that creative thinking is still with real people.
In one line:
"Humans are still one step ahead in coding—at least to this day!"
