Show HN: I over-engineered a dingbats style puzzle game with AI agents

i love cryptic crosswords and word puzzles but there wasn't a great[1] daily "wordle" equivalent in the rebus (a.k.a dingbats) puzzles world

i wanted to play it enough to build it - but i quickly realised it's not very fun to play your own puzzles.

so i built a complex, ai agent flow to autonomously spoon feed me puzzles, they were a mix of:

1. incredibly obvious (e.g. answer written straight in plain text) 2. completely incomprehensible (e.g. no idea how you could get the answer from the image)

so i "improved" the system by adding more agents to check the work of the agents and rate the subtlety and solvability of puzzles using a range of complex heuristics.

which worked well since it filtered out 100% of the ai generated puzzles, then i added some feedback loops from these agents to the puzzle generation agent...

which made it very expensive to run.

then, a friend of mine told me how much he also loves these types of puzzles, so we deleted (most) of the ai agents - and we use more basic tooling to set each-other puzzles each day.

have fun.

footnote: [1] the dailydingbats IG is pretty good though, check it out if you like dingbats