A small look inside the MiniWord sausage factory. This whole thing started as an experiment to learn about crossword construction, and has slowly become more about leveraging LLMs to build tools to improve the process now that I find myself needing to crank one out daily.

LLMs are not great at multidimensional reasoning and zero-shotting a perfect grid. But they're really good at pretending to be an editor, and better than me at least at salting clues to taste for difficulty. Haven't started using the feature here to beef up the challenge on the MiniWord, but we've got some interesting options with something like this.

Tempted to drop a difficulty setting in MiniWord (say: Easy, Challenging, Expert) and have corresponding leaderboards.

If you're solving the MiniWord daily, let me know your thoughts. For now it's fun to see the apples-to-apples comparison of who can do it the fastest. But it's clear there's some of you out there that want a challenge, and that's one click away on my side

At some point I'll open source the puzzle builder too, and open MiniWord for user-submitted puzzles. They're pretty fun to make once you've got the robots doing the annoying parts

To spill a little tea: not this weekend but next I have a 6x6 for Saturday and a 7x7 for Sunday. Cluing should still be pretty straightforward but a bigger grid to work with. The problem I'm up against here is that easier puzzles are just a better entrypoint to get folks using the thing. But there's probably two user groups we'll want to have in the long run: folks that just want a fun puzzle to play against their friends and puzzle nerds who want to go deep. Separate leaderboards is one option to make both happy long-term

v cool 🤓 so obvious in retrospect but hadn't thot about this before. would love more difficulty pls 🙏 will they always be 5x5?