The article provides an overview of Advent of Code 2025, a series of programming puzzles designed for various skill levels, and offers general tips for participants. It also addresses frequently asked questions regarding the event's structure, authentication, puzzle difficulty, and changes to the leaderboard system. The event, which starts on December 1st, encourages participation regardless of programming background and emphasizes problem-solving skills.

The article discusses the author's journey in creating a solver for regular-expression crosswords using the Z3 SMT solver. It details the process of encoding regular expressions as deterministic finite automata (DFAs) and integrating them into Z3 to solve the puzzles, along with insights gained during development. The author also shares their code on GitHub for others to explore.