Comment by GuB-42

The competition never was about actual obfuscation. If you really just want obfuscation, you are actually writing a DRM system, like Denuvo.

If anything, it is closer to code golf, the main obfuscation is often a result of all the trickery needed to do something impressive in a small amount of code. Of course, minification techniques are used, like renaming variables to single character and messing with the formatting, but that's the boring part, no one is going to win because of that.

Another aspect is being clever and unique, and abusing the rules is often rewarded... once. LLMs are not good at that. The judges are human, the code needs to a appeal to a human, not just be hard to understand.