That’s a fun idea. I often stumble across fun facts while making the clues. I’ll think about this more and experiment a bit when I have time!

It’s a lot of manual work right now. I don’t use AI in the process. I think it could help with some of the brainstorming but I kind of like the human connection of making a puzzle and having people solve it.

Here’s the basic process.

My wife and I do this part together:

- Think of a theme

- Think of words related to that theme, ideally with a second meaning

- Think of clues for those words

Once we have a good set of clues I plug them into a program I wrote to make crosswords.

The program isn’t that smart. It tries making random crosswords. I run it 1500 times and then sort the results to get the best ones. This brute force approach works pretty well for how simple it is.

I pick the crossword I want and then I use another tool to split up and rearrange the tiles. This step could probably be automated but there’s some finicky logic to the best way to split up the tiles and it goes pretty fast manually.

I’ve been meaning to make a video of the process! I’ll share it here when I do

The design and dev took a while but building the has been the most time consuming at this point. My wife and I make the puzzles together.

We’re getting close to 6 months of daily, hand crafted puzzles!

Since the beginning I’ve allowed sharing your daily score. I have thought about extending that (leaderboards, etc.)

Do you have other ideas to amplify it?