In case anyone was wondering, the IOCCC specifically permits LLM use in their guidelines.
"The IOCCC has a rich history of remarkable winning entries created by authors who skillfully employed various techniques (often their own tools) to develop their code."
In my experience LLMs were pretty good at deobfuscating many entries (including mine) but very awful at generating any significantly obfuscated code. So obfuscation can be regarded as a truly humane art---at least for now.
It's a bit annoying getting frontier models to even work on IOCCC code because of "safety", but even if you get around that LLMs just aren't very good at it. Obfuscating code involves a level of creativity and deviousness that LLMs struggle to meet.
https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/ncw1/pr...
The author, Nick Craig-Wood, is the creator of rclone!
[0] https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/cable/p...
[1] https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/cable/R...
"The IOCCC has a rich history of remarkable winning entries created by authors who skillfully employed various techniques (often their own tools) to develop their code."