GRIND404: I turned my "Passion" for LeetCode into a playable arcade game

This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition.

What I Built

My passion is not a hobby. It is not a sports team. It is a deep, principled, load-bearing hatred of LeetCode and the interview-industrial complex it represents.

The challenge asked for rivalry, fandom, and devotion. So I present devotion in its purest negative form:

💀 GRIND404 — the LeetCode Subversion Arcade

GRIND404 scrapes real, live LeetCode problems, subverts them into parody, and dares you to answer. But there's a twist that is also the entire point:

You don't solve the problems. You desecrate them. A rigged judge rejects you no matter what — and solving one honestly is a scoring penalty.

You rack up points by being maximally cursed: return true;, hardcoding the test cases, DOSing the judge with while(true){}, negotiating the time complexity down to O(vibes). The judge rejects all of it with escalating, passive-aggressive verdicts — and occasionally "accepts" your garbage just to hurt you.

The Inspiration

Every developer has stared at a "Medium" problem with a 31% acceptance rate at 2am and felt something break. LeetCode turned the joy of programming into a grindable, gatekept, dopamine-slot-machine of a ritual that has almost nothing to do with the actual job.

I couldn't fix that in a weekend. But I could make fun of it in a weekend, and give everyone who's ever rage-quit a Two Sum variant a place to channel it. Catharsis-as-a-service.

How It Works

 LeetCode GraphQL ──▶ Subversion Engine ──▶ Rigged Judge ──▶ Wall of Rejection
 (the live "mark")     Gemini / offline       never lets       (leaderboard)
                       template satire         you win

1. Scrape the mark. A FastAPI backend pulls a random real problem from LeetCode's public GraphQL endpoint. It's only ever used as input — the game never republishes LeetCode's copyrighted text. No network? It falls back to a shipped, self-authored problem set, so the whole thing runs air-gapped.
2. Subvert it. The problem is transformed into an honest, absurdist restatement plus a menu of gloriously degenerate answers.
3. Judge it. A rigged judge rejects everything and rewards degeneracy with points.
4. Fail publicly. Post your rank to the Wall of Glorious Rejection.

Here's a subverted round and one of the judge's verdicts:

🤖 Best Use of Google AI

The subversion engine is powered by Google Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash). Each round, Gemini is prompted — with a tuned system prompt and a few-shot example — to:

• rewrite the real problem as biting parody that references its actual mechanic (the sliding window, the DP table, the linked list),
• generate four "answers," three degenerate and exactly one honest-but-penalized trap,
• and write a rigged one-line verdict roasting both the answer and the industry.

Crucially, Gemini makes the game sharper and endlessly varied — but it is never a single point of failure. If there's no API key or the quota's dry, a deterministic template-satire engine takes over, so the demo never breaks. AI as an enhancement, not a dependency.

Tech Stack

• Backend: FastAPI + httpx (async LeetCode + Gemini calls), Python 3.12
• AI: Google Gemini via REST, with an offline fallback engine
• Frontend: vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, no build step (because webpack is also LeetCode's fault)
• Ship: one slim Docker image, healthcheck, named volume for the leaderboard — docker compose up and you're grinding

Try It

git clone https://github.com/xbill9/passion && cd passion
docker compose up --build          # offline satire, zero keys
# or, with AI subversion:
GEMINI_API_KEY=your_key docker compose up --build
# → http://localhost:8000

A Good-Faith Note

Scraping LeetCode wholesale violates their ToS and their problem text is copyrighted. GRIND404 does not redistribute that content — it fetches a problem, transforms it into original parody/commentary, and only ever displays the subverted result. Live fetching is off-by-a-flag and a self-authored offline set ships in the box, so the app never depends on scraping. This is satire and commentary, made with love and spite in equal measure. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or liked by LeetCode.

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Built in a weekend out of pure spite. If you've ever been rejected for "insufficient passion," this one's for you. #weekendchallenge