I am not sure what is going on with here recently, maybe I have overgrown the place, or maybe everyday a little by little this place is getting filled with people who shouldn't be talking about CS.
Dijkstra said computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes.
I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.
I have a .vimrc file with LSPs and whatnot. But it was from 3 years back. These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box. I would say the choice of editor is the least consequential thing in one's understanding of "CS" and programming methodologies. On the other hand, using debuggers, profilers, monitoring tooling can have a real impact on how you solve some problems.
There are forums which ask domain-specific questions as a CAPTCHA upon attempting to register an account, and as someone who has employed such a method, it is very effective. (Example: what nominal diameter is the intake valve stem on a 1954 Buick Nailhead?)
As long as this challenge remains obscure enough to be not worth implementing special handlers in the crawler, this sounds a neat idea.
But I think if everyone starts doing this particular challenge (char count), the crawlers will start instructing a cheap LLM to do appropriate tool calls and get around it. So the challenge needs to be obscure.
I wonder if anyone tried building a crawler-firewall or even nginx script which will let the site admin plug their own challenge generator in lua or something, which would then create a minimum HTML form. Maybe even vibe code it :)