[Submitted on 16 Jan 2026]

Separating Problem Solving from Code Generation: Evaluating LLMs on Competitive Programming Through Natural-Language Editorials

This paper argues that evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) on competitive programming tasks conflate two distinct abilities: algorithmic problem-solving and code-level implementation. The authors propose using natural-language editorials as an intermediate step to separate these skills. Their experiments show that generating editorials before code im