I did fine on this problem! recognized how to do it, implemented it, and found that I was getting better solutions than the example? that, upon manual inspection, worked?! I spent about 20 minutes absolutely baffled until I noticed a minor detail in the problem statement: you can't build two robots at once.
from there, I was off, still made 82nd place on the leaderboard (apparently I do well at problems that take a long time), and then had no problems upgrading my solution for part 2 as I had already been forced to make my code somewhat performant.
82nd and 28th is not bad! it's better than I hoped going in, and slightly better than my average over the past couple weeks. I just feel like I missed out on the big time spots - top 10 feels better than top 100 even if top spots award similar numbers of points (it's not like mario kart where you really care about 1st - it's just bragging rights)