This is great, thank you! I predict agentic coding will change software dramatically in this direction. I recently had my weather app showing me a full-screen video ad. It drove me so mad that I developed wwads in a few hours with claude, Weather Without Ads (or any tracking, etc.), which can be installed as a PWA on Android or iOS. https://jmrk84.github.io/wwads/
What a great idea! I've grown pretty frustrated by the ads and constant nags for subscriptions modern weather apps pester you with. I've resorted to the state developed apps in Norway and Denmark but yours seems like a great alternative too.
nice! good idea! I haven't looked into doing a PWA. I've never built one before, but this puzzle app is built with Ruby on Rails and I know the framework has tools for doing PWAs
Indeed. I started coding games/math exercise for my children to make sure they are ads free, and no monetisation shenanigans. I can totally see how it become a new trend.
Strong +1 to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. One note: the main iOS app is a little wonky in places. I've been using Kyle Swarmer's "Puzzles Reloaded" app, which is a little nicer in places.
The MacOS build on the page is quite old, and doesn't reflect recent fixes/enhancements. If you want to build it from source for MacOS the included instructions won't work because Simon's 'halibut' documentation tool will be missing.
2) Build the puzzles app, pointing CMake at that halibut binary. Do this in a fresh build dir (don't reuse a stale top-level CMakeCache.txt that already recorded HALIBUT-NOTFOUND):
I install Simon's collection on every device of mine, as well as PySol.
(I'm stuck on Guess aka Mastermind right now, and damn good at it if I say so myself! Also Solo aka Sudoku on 6 sub-blocks, with X+Jigsaw+Killer & No symmetry+Unreasonable difficulty.)
I feel like I shouldn't need to say this, but Simon is also the Author of the awesome PuTTY. Until fairly recently, a vital tool of anyone doing remote management from Windows.
Nice! The first app I built and put is https://peopleneed.love
Just a simple site to let random people encourage other random people. It was a good way for me to learn some of the Ruby on Rails Hotwire tools.
Looks nice but feels severely underbaked. Did a medium soduku puzzle. Made a mistake, so I tried erasing it to get rid of the noise. 0? no. backspace? also no apparently. then I just mashed other number keys to see if the square was responive at all and I failed the puzzle. Why does sodoku need a fail counter in the first place?
Yeah, I didn't like the mistake feature because it flags it as soon as you make the error. In my case, it was actually a miss-click, so whilst I was confident with the answer I wanted to put, knowing that it had effectively just confirmed that for me made it feel like I was cheating. I'd rather make the mistake with no feedback, find the duplicate and go through the process of working out what was wrong, just as I would with paper.
EDIT: just played a hard game, and genuinely made a mistake. Having it tell me immediately definitely was cheating as there was then only one other answer that square could have been.
Fair criticism. I appreciate the feedback! I thought I made the backspace key work on Sudoku. I'll look into that. I know "E" works for erase. Just checked it and if the incorrect answer is selected, you can press "E" or "delete"/"backspace" and that should clear the incorrect answer. As for the fail counter, it's so that the leaderboards are fair. If someone can just faceroll the keyboard to solve the puzzle quickly, it's not really fair for the leaderboards. But I get it. Sudoku isn't typically really a competitive puzzle and when doing them on paper, you often will erase wrong answers and keep going.
I am used to 0 and backspace, not too difficult to allow 0 key to clear a cell.
Curious if you could let me know what code or images provide the backgrounds on your Kakuro, is it a CSS diagonal line, or a tile? What comes up if you run a quick:
Good to know. Yeah, it's pretty easy to add 0, so I'll do that soon. For the kakuro backgrounds, it's pure CSS, no images. The diagonal split in the clue cells is a single linear-gradient hairline, not a tile or PNG:
I have been playing nonograms for a year now, there was never insta death, controls are a little off, title is hidden until its solved to avoid spoilers This is obviously programmed by someone who doesn't play nonograms. Safe to assume it was vibe-coded
Thanks for the feedback. I've done nonograms with a three strikes and your out style, so I based it off of that. I just couldn't find any without having to watch ads often before and after playing a puzzle. Good criticism about hiding the title until after it's solved. Someone else mentioned that as well. It's on my list of things to change actually.
Like I wrote to the person who you're replying to, it's not some slop web app. I'm a professional software engineer and I coded this the same way I code at work, with agentic AI using Ruby on Rails, following TDD, thin controllers & models, security best practices, ect.
Nope, I don't care about your email. Just a way for you to track progress, contribute to leaderboards, get achievements, and be able to reset your password if you forget it. The end-goal was originally just for me to have an ad-free place for me to play my favorite puzzle games and I shared it with HN. I do ask for a couple bucks after a solver finishes 25 of every puzzle + difficulty just to help out with server costs. But I don't dream that I'll even break even on this.
I'm a software engineer for my job and just code apps for a fun hobby in my spare time. Pretty much, most every software engineer uses agentic AI coding tools these days. I built this the same way I build software for my job. So it's not some slop codebase with API keys sitting in the HTML :)
I feel like the Nonogram is AI generated? There’s no way a human would set a perfectly symmetrical “diamond” as a medium difficulty puzzle. Worse yet, the hard difficulty is just “big diamond”, the same thing on a slightly larger grid.
I one shot games every now and then, just to see how much it can do. For anyone wanting to experiment, I have come to learn that if you make it make browser games the setup is even easier since it can just inject the JS into the HTML and import from a popular CDN, no node, no compilers needed, just a single HTML page with inline JS.
I'm curious, What kind of details are you thinking of? I'm not sure I really have much of a radar for LLM websites in the way I do for LLM pictures or music.
I don't know for pictures, but I have gotten pretty good at detecting AI in videos. I am noticing these a lot on youtube. Often you can tell, e. g. movements being weird, animals behaving in ways that are only in a short and nowhere else to be found. And some more indicators e. g. youtube insists on showing sexy girls, but the video is clearly "cut" into another video and the surface layers also don't fully align; or some proportions are odd (I don't mean the "regular" ones but e. g. when the biceps looks like semi-hulk, you know something is AI slop). I try to not watch AI slop but sometimes it happens.
For images, there are some clear styles AI leans heavily on if not actively steered away[0].
It can definitely be prompted pretty successfully though, a bird spotting app was up her on HN recently with some really nice looking woodblock prints that were AI generated (I always feel disappointed/tricked when art turns out to be made by AI, I'm not sure why, it seems to pull the joy out of it for me)
I hear ya. Fair criticism. I'm a professional developer myself, but not great at design. I've tried to come up with a different looking site best I could. I went with a newspaper theme like back in the day when you'd get the puzzles in the paper. And then it was my idea to have a sudoku being solved as a graphic on the front page. I would push back that this could be one-shot by any of the leading models including Fable. Each of the 10 puzzle types has to have its own generator and they're different from each other. They have to handle uniqueness, solvability, and difficulty and none of the leading models have nailed even just a single generator on the first shot. Plus, there's monetization, rate limiting, caching, among other things under the hood that models wouldn't typically touch without specific instruction or would, at best, half-ass it. Maybe you have better luck with them, but for my job, I work on a large legacy app as well as various microservices and the LLMs miss things all the time. I have a system I use that does make them perform better, but you still gotta watch em like a hawk.
The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.
I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.
Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.
My family and I went down a very similar path, we were tired of all the ads and dark patterns when we just wanted to play simple puzzle games. We made a pretty similar site/app
Based on the title, I was expecting the things I grew up calling logic puzzles, which some people call "logic grid" puzzles, e.g. https://www.allstarpuzzles.com/logic/00019.html (note: expired HTTPS certificate, but site doesn't ask for any login or anything, it just displays the puzzles) or https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/
When I was a kid, learning programming, I toyed with writing my own logic-puzzle solver program, but the challenge of turning words on their side defeated me at the time. Now it's just one line of CSS. :-)
Would you be interested in adding logic puzzles / logic grid puzzles? They're not that hard to create automatically; spend long enough on https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/ and you'll definitely notice that those puzzles are being auto-generated by an algorithm.
I’m personally invested in a Kakuro variant I have built, and a print book[0] in the past few years, manually. I have recently augmented the website with Claude Code.[1]
So I am in a position to notice a design choice that I made appear in a somewhat substantially vibe-coded collection.
Though not a globally unique or revolutionary design element, the diagonal pinstripe background in this site’s Kakuro looks surprisingly similar to my own.
Looks great. FYI, Claude has idunno, maybe 20-30 different strongly themed websites it knows how to make, and this newspaper aesthetic is one of them, and all the sites it does this way look exactly the same.
It's a good aesthetic for your site, and I thought it was a good one for one of my sites. But eventually I redesigned my site significantly when I saw that it's gonna be common among vibed-up website designs and they look exactly the same.
Yep, I feel ya. Good feedback. This is like version 3 of the home page. The first two looked very typical AI. I thought maybe a newspaper vibe might be cool as a throwback to the puzzles you'd do in the paper. But it does have some of those cookie cutter AI tells. I'm a software engineer by trade and not much of a designer honestly. This probably won't be the final form of the home page, I'd imagine.
I mean, it does look cool. Felt unique when I had landed on it. But then I saw another site that looked identical to mine and I moved on.
I'm the same as you, not much of a designer, I was kind of elated when I got some good, themed, opinionated designs for some of my sites that felt like it was coming out of a collaborative brainstorming session, and matched the vibe I wanted. And then let down when I worked out there's only a limited number of things I can get the LLM to express, and it's gonna be similar for others.
I hadn't seen star battle before. Was fun. Wanted to play another medium one so created an account and it opened up the same puzzle, so then i just clicked through what i remembered and now i'm way too high on the leaderboard. I feel like a fraud!
the star battle interface diverges from penpa, puzpre, and puzzleteam in a number of basic ways that actively make the solving experience worse imo:
- having to switch between "star" and "exclude" modes is annoying on desktop, and most sites allow right click for placing "exclude" marks. it was a surprise that right click not only popped up the context menu but also placed a star (in a wrong spot, of course).
- counting mistakes doesn't make sense for a binary determination puzzle like star battle imo (or most logic puzzles for that matter). solving on paper doesn't count mistakes so what does a digital solving interface gain by doing so?
as someone who does a lot of logic puzzles (and thus would be in the market for buying a puzzle set) these usability obstacles make the inclusion of star battle feel like an afterthought.
My daughter and I play it most nights, and she has been developing her deductive reasoning quickly enough that she occasionally sees the next move first now.
I see this kind of thing as the future of SaaS. Passionate developers out competing incumbents on both quality and price. One off purchases from "1000 true fans" is enough to make the effort worthwhile. It's a win-win for indie devs and their customers.
Just before putting the 2 in here (above the pencil 6), I put in 6 and it said Mistake, so I erased it and put 2. But... why wouldn't 6 be valid there?
EDIT: As per replies, "X" Sudoku is variant with a different rule. While I saw the diagonals "highlighted" in another color, I didn't know that rule. Perhaps it could be added to the page for those unfamiliar with this non-standard Sudoku variant?
Because there's already another 6 on the same main diagonal. This is an "X Sudoku" puzzle, which means that each main diagonal must have all 9 different numbers.
if you like sudoku, you owe it to yourself to check out the "cracking the cryptic" youtube channel and get introduced to the delightful world of variant sudoku.
I remember the blocker to a Sudoku app I was making in secondary school was just getting good puzzles. They're hard to make, particularly if you're signing up to make a new one every day. I guess you could create them with AI now, but you'd run significant risk of them being uncalibrated for difficulty or just outright invalid.
Nice puzzles, thanks letting me have a couple of fun minutes with those.
In the star battle (at least the medium I played) the solutions are non-unique and there you sometimes make random mistakes, which is a bit annoying. Unless I'm missing something because it's already late, but I'm quite sure.
It doesn't cost me much to run. About $9/month for the VPS + domain and I run other apps on the same VPS. Just my little hobby server. It does have monetization though, but I give the first 25 puzzles of each type + difficulty for free and then you pay a few bucks to unlock the rest. Maybe I'm being too generous, but it's not a big deal really.
Nice! I wanted to share a link to Ripple Effect Hard with my time (23:47), but it seems the URL only captures attempts, so there's no real way to link to the puzzle itself.
Might be useful to
- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or
- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)
I'll plug a little page that I (well, Claude) put together for bite-sized 4x4 Sudoku puzzles mixing popular variant constraints:
https://yakymp.github.io/sudoku4x4/
Not good? I'm not opposed to that. I just needed a place to put it and in the account settings seemed natural. Then there's no cookies or anything. The setting is just stored in the database.
Love it! My only feedback is the many-squared puzzles are hard to play on a phone without a stylus (accidental misclicks are challenging with the small box size)
Wanted to add my puzzle engine built for TUI. I have 15 puzzles, zine printing, and daily/weekly seeded challenges. Love seeing more puzzles without corporate shilling being the bitter aftertaste.
By the way, if you are interested in nonograms specifically, there is a great website nonograms.org that has tens of thousands nonograms (both B&W and color) and no ads.
Oh yeah, I think I've seen it before. I got some inspiration for some of the nonograms that I made from some different sites. Not all of the sites that I've seen have had a great UI, especially on mobile, which is why I wanted to add nonograms to this site specifically.
Or you could use https://krazydad.com/ which has been around for decades, contains interesting puzzles many of which are types the author invented, and isn't AI slop.
haha! no thanks :) I play it myself because it doesn't have ads and cause it has multiple puzzles that I like. It is monetized though. You get the first 25 puzzles for free in every puzzle type + difficulty, then you can pay a few bucks to unlock all of the rest. But this site has made $0 so far. It may never make anything, but at least I'll still have a place to play the puzzles :)
Love the look of the site. I have also grown tired of ads showing up everywhere nowadays. I'd much rather spend a bit of money than be forced to watch through another ad.
I also hate ads in games, ... and as another serious restriction I only play on thumb slide games (think 2048) that just make me think enough (i want to relax) so I and Fable 5 developed https://squishy.franzai.com/ (Design is Opus 4.8, iOS Frame also Opus 4.8 - as Fable was gone by then).
Now waiting already for a week for Apple greenlighting my iOS update for the level builder...
Haha, yeah, the early puzzles are pretty simple, but they do start to get more variety as you progress through them.
I hear ya. Maybe multiples of 5 would've been better. Mainly, I was trying to get a good mobile experience with as big of a board as I could. Perhaps not the best call.
Nice! real cool! This site does have monetization, but I give the first 25 puzzles free for each difficulty level. So a good amount of free content and I'm still trying to add more games.
I hate that it immediately flags your errors. First, because it doesn't forgive the casual finger slipping or forgetting if you are in pen or pencil mode. And then because it partially gives away the solution.
After starting a nonogram level, it seems you can't go back to it because you're just prompted to sign up or log in. As mentioned already they're also shitty puzzles.
// Fire view events (e.g. unlock_prompt_viewed) for any monetization prompt
// present in the freshly loaded page. data-analytics-view-events is a JSON
// array so one rendered prompt can report several events at once.
It's referring to the fact that after you complete 25 puzzles of a specific difficulty, it'll prompt you to unlock all the puzzles for a couple bucks. Helps offset server costs to run the site. So the comment in the code is addressing if a user has viewed that prompt or not. So not a "prompt" in the LLM sense.
Neat! I've recently built a Sudoku for my friends in Flutter as we were tired of ads showing up prior to games in most versions you can find on the Playstore. I gotta check out the the other games on this website too.
Good feedback. I've struggled with it honestly. Trying to make a good user experience, but it's tricky with 10 puzzles types and more coming. Is it the amount of puzzles that feels that way?
No, it is mostly the topbar and the blank space for some reason, maybe make the games more centric to the homepage? I am not very good at describing things
Not behind Tor here, but I just got a "406 Not Acceptable" with "Your browser is not supported". I'm running Firefox here, but on an older machine with an ESR v115 release. Does your site use particular functionality not supported in older Firefox?
Alrighty, I figured it out. You should be able to use it now. It's because I'm using Tailwind CSS version 4 and some of the things won't look perfectly in that browser version, but the site should be functional now for ya!
The AI generated nonograms are actually better. I made the diamond myself sadly. They do get harder as you progress through them. I'm not good at pixel art, so I started with simple things like diamond and heart, but you're not the first to mention it, so I should've probably left those out.
Good feedback! I've built a wordle clone in the past (back when I had to write it all by hand!). Right now, I'm focused on logic puzzles and there are dozens more I'd like to add, but word puzzles may be coming at some point in the future. I had thought of them, but there's just so many different puzzles I want to put on there!
awesome. def need levels of difficulty for word puzzles against the AI; would be impossible to win otherwise :)
along those lines, you know what might be interesting is to have OSS models, including old ones, and select the model to play against (a bit like stockfish has different algos you can play chess against). This substitutes for levels of difficulty (assuming the old/small OSS models are worse, though when it comes to scrabble they might be just as good as any human in which case you would have to introduce some noise to degrade their performance
went to today's puzzle, was assigned an easy symmetrical nonogram. even though that was a disappointing start i was open to doing more, so i opened a hard one and was faced with a nonogram symmetrical on more axes than the easy one.
since a human would know these are bad nonograms, i have to assume this is all llm-generated.
i see you have already addressed similar comments, just sharing my two cents since i usually love puzzles.
> Create a free account to keep playing. Sign up or log in to create an account, save your progress, and continue this difficulty.
And here we are again. A nice idea, ai generated, for grabbing email addresses... Not even trying to give it a human touch. Is this the new spam? Hundreds of sites and web apps forcing you to sign up with a temp email address for no good reason?
No it's not a lie. It doesn't have ads or a subscription. You do need to login to continue playing more of the same type + difficulty for puzzles. There is an eventual paywall after you reach 25 puzzles + difficulty (so like after you've done 25 easy sudoku puzzles and you want to do more easy ones) for a couple bucks to help offset server costs. But it's a one-time thing. No monthly subscription at all. In all transparency, I've made $0 so far. No one has even reached the 25 free puzzle limit for any of the puzzles on there.
I think the messaging is just a bit confusing. You've said this had no ads and no subscription, and then people see you want them to create an account. If there's no money being paid, and no ads then the next conclusion is either you'll sell data or rug-pull later on. Clearly that isn't actually your intention.
Maybe try changing how you talk about the price a bit on the page. No one's going to be put off by knowing there's a lot of free content, and then later on you have a one-off fee to continue playing. But they will be put off if they don't understand how any of the pricing works, and if they feel like there's a catch you're not telling them about.
I get what you're trying to do, you want to offer something on the cheap and that's great. Just be open about when the payment is needed, and what that payment is. You'll likely get more sign ups from being open about it up front.
I don't have any need for your email address. You could put "foo@bar.com" in there if you want. The account is for tracking progress and eventually there is a paywall. I give 25 puzzles for free for every puzzle type + every difficulty, but after that, you pay a couple bucks to unlock the rest of the puzzles. Helps pay the server fees. Although I've made $0 so far and that's fine really. This is mostly just a fun little site for people to use.
Show HNs are places to discuss people's work respectfully and curiously, so attacks like this are particularly harmful here. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
You can make your substantive points without any of that, and if you had followed the HN guidelines in general, you would have:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
This is great, thank you! I predict agentic coding will change software dramatically in this direction. I recently had my weather app showing me a full-screen video ad. It drove me so mad that I developed wwads in a few hours with claude, Weather Without Ads (or any tracking, etc.), which can be installed as a PWA on Android or iOS. https://jmrk84.github.io/wwads/
What a great idea! I've grown pretty frustrated by the ads and constant nags for subscriptions modern weather apps pester you with. I've resorted to the state developed apps in Norway and Denmark but yours seems like a great alternative too.
nice! good idea! I haven't looked into doing a PWA. I've never built one before, but this puzzle app is built with Ruby on Rails and I know the framework has tools for doing PWAs
Indeed. I started coding games/math exercise for my children to make sure they are ads free, and no monetisation shenanigans. I can totally see how it become a new trend.
This is nice!
Readers may also enjoy Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, available for mobile as well: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
(My favorite currently is Dominosa. Playing the Hard mode is teaching me new patterns.)
Mine is currently Net, 7x7 grid with wrapping variant. I take about 5 minutes on average to solve a level, which is the sweet spot for me
Oh, this is kinda fun, I'm gonna play with it for a bit!
Strong +1 to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. One note: the main iOS app is a little wonky in places. I've been using Kyle Swarmer's "Puzzles Reloaded" app, which is a little nicer in places.
Wow, didn't know this existed until today. Thanks!
The MacOS build on the page is quite old, and doesn't reflect recent fixes/enhancements. If you want to build it from source for MacOS the included instructions won't work because Simon's 'halibut' documentation tool will be missing.
So you need to:
1) Build Halibut from source:
2) Build the puzzles app, pointing CMake at that halibut binary. Do this in a fresh build dir (don't reuse a stale top-level CMakeCache.txt that already recorded HALIBUT-NOTFOUND):
3) Now you have build-osx/Puzzles.app and can (optionally) build the dmg:
I install Simon's collection on every device of mine, as well as PySol.
(I'm stuck on Guess aka Mastermind right now, and damn good at it if I say so myself! Also Solo aka Sudoku on 6 sub-blocks, with X+Jigsaw+Killer & No symmetry+Unreasonable difficulty.)
Yeah, this collection is _awesome_. I'm currently enjoying the Towers (just do it on 5x5 simple, and find it quite relaxing!).
This one is so good. Original puzzles, works fine on mobile. Very future proof.
My favorite is pearl.
I feel like I shouldn't need to say this, but Simon is also the Author of the awesome PuTTY. Until fairly recently, a vital tool of anyone doing remote management from Windows.
(Over a decade ago now?) I created https://kardland.com with a couple of solitaire games. No ads or other bullshit.
I had intended to add more solitaire games but moved on to other projects. At the time it was an excuse for me to learn Javascript.
Nice! The first app I built and put is https://peopleneed.love Just a simple site to let random people encourage other random people. It was a good way for me to learn some of the Ruby on Rails Hotwire tools.
Looks nice but feels severely underbaked. Did a medium soduku puzzle. Made a mistake, so I tried erasing it to get rid of the noise. 0? no. backspace? also no apparently. then I just mashed other number keys to see if the square was responive at all and I failed the puzzle. Why does sodoku need a fail counter in the first place?
This is why I've built my own Sudoku. Offline, no timer, no fail count, just pick up and play... Will come in handy on flights later this year x)
Yeah, I didn't like the mistake feature because it flags it as soon as you make the error. In my case, it was actually a miss-click, so whilst I was confident with the answer I wanted to put, knowing that it had effectively just confirmed that for me made it feel like I was cheating. I'd rather make the mistake with no feedback, find the duplicate and go through the process of working out what was wrong, just as I would with paper.
EDIT: just played a hard game, and genuinely made a mistake. Having it tell me immediately definitely was cheating as there was then only one other answer that square could have been.
Fair criticism. I appreciate the feedback! I thought I made the backspace key work on Sudoku. I'll look into that. I know "E" works for erase. Just checked it and if the incorrect answer is selected, you can press "E" or "delete"/"backspace" and that should clear the incorrect answer. As for the fail counter, it's so that the leaderboards are fair. If someone can just faceroll the keyboard to solve the puzzle quickly, it's not really fair for the leaderboards. But I get it. Sudoku isn't typically really a competitive puzzle and when doing them on paper, you often will erase wrong answers and keep going.
I am used to 0 and backspace, not too difficult to allow 0 key to clear a cell.
Curious if you could let me know what code or images provide the backgrounds on your Kakuro, is it a CSS diagonal line, or a tile? What comes up if you run a quick:
Reminds me of mine!
Good to know. Yeah, it's pretty easy to add 0, so I'll do that soon. For the kakuro backgrounds, it's pure CSS, no images. The diagonal split in the clue cells is a single linear-gradient hairline, not a tile or PNG:
.kakuro-clue { background-image: linear-gradient(to top right, transparent calc(50% - 0.5px), rgb(148 163 184) calc(50% - 0.5px), rgb(148 163 184) calc(50% + 0.5px), transparent calc(50% + 0.5px)); }
The site uses Tailwind CSS for the styling generally.
> Create a free account to keep playing.
After 3 attempts (all moves were mistakes! maybe I'm too stupid?) asked for my email.
Is emails collection the end-goal of this (vibe-coded, I suppose) page?
I have been playing nonograms for a year now, there was never insta death, controls are a little off, title is hidden until its solved to avoid spoilers This is obviously programmed by someone who doesn't play nonograms. Safe to assume it was vibe-coded
Thanks for the feedback. I've done nonograms with a three strikes and your out style, so I based it off of that. I just couldn't find any without having to watch ads often before and after playing a puzzle. Good criticism about hiding the title until after it's solved. Someone else mentioned that as well. It's on my list of things to change actually. Like I wrote to the person who you're replying to, it's not some slop web app. I'm a professional software engineer and I coded this the same way I code at work, with agentic AI using Ruby on Rails, following TDD, thin controllers & models, security best practices, ect.
Nope, I don't care about your email. Just a way for you to track progress, contribute to leaderboards, get achievements, and be able to reset your password if you forget it. The end-goal was originally just for me to have an ad-free place for me to play my favorite puzzle games and I shared it with HN. I do ask for a couple bucks after a solver finishes 25 of every puzzle + difficulty just to help out with server costs. But I don't dream that I'll even break even on this.
I'm a software engineer for my job and just code apps for a fun hobby in my spare time. Pretty much, most every software engineer uses agentic AI coding tools these days. I built this the same way I build software for my job. So it's not some slop codebase with API keys sitting in the HTML :)
I feel like the Nonogram is AI generated? There’s no way a human would set a perfectly symmetrical “diamond” as a medium difficulty puzzle. Worse yet, the hard difficulty is just “big diamond”, the same thing on a slightly larger grid.
I mean the front page is full of LLM smells, so presumably the games are made that way too.
And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.
I one shot games every now and then, just to see how much it can do. For anyone wanting to experiment, I have come to learn that if you make it make browser games the setup is even easier since it can just inject the JS into the HTML and import from a popular CDN, no node, no compilers needed, just a single HTML page with inline JS.
I do the same with new models.
> the front page is full of LLM smells
I'm curious, What kind of details are you thinking of? I'm not sure I really have much of a radar for LLM websites in the way I do for LLM pictures or music.
I don't know for pictures, but I have gotten pretty good at detecting AI in videos. I am noticing these a lot on youtube. Often you can tell, e. g. movements being weird, animals behaving in ways that are only in a short and nowhere else to be found. And some more indicators e. g. youtube insists on showing sexy girls, but the video is clearly "cut" into another video and the surface layers also don't fully align; or some proportions are odd (I don't mean the "regular" ones but e. g. when the biceps looks like semi-hulk, you know something is AI slop). I try to not watch AI slop but sometimes it happens.
For images, there are some clear styles AI leans heavily on if not actively steered away[0].
It can definitely be prompted pretty successfully though, a bird spotting app was up her on HN recently with some really nice looking woodblock prints that were AI generated (I always feel disappointed/tricked when art turns out to be made by AI, I'm not sure why, it seems to pull the joy out of it for me)
[0] https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/the-100000-whys-of-ai
The UI of this site is similar to what Claude likes to generate. The fonts and text style, for example, scream of Claude Opus/Fable.
I saw it immediately as well. Some tells for me are:
- Off-white or sepia toned backgrounds, similar subdued color palette for icons, grey ALL CAPS subheadings
- Serifed headings
- Various "Item: Quantity" lists (Puzzle types: 10, Puzzles solved: 1,951, etc.)
- Middle dot character for separator
One common tell it is lacking is the placement of colored dots or circles in the corners of panels or other UI elements, sometimes animated/pulsing.
To be clear it's not bad, it's a clean and friendly style. It just has that certain look, like a visual "it's not X it's Y".
I hear ya. Fair criticism. I'm a professional developer myself, but not great at design. I've tried to come up with a different looking site best I could. I went with a newspaper theme like back in the day when you'd get the puzzles in the paper. And then it was my idea to have a sudoku being solved as a graphic on the front page. I would push back that this could be one-shot by any of the leading models including Fable. Each of the 10 puzzle types has to have its own generator and they're different from each other. They have to handle uniqueness, solvability, and difficulty and none of the leading models have nailed even just a single generator on the first shot. Plus, there's monetization, rate limiting, caching, among other things under the hood that models wouldn't typically touch without specific instruction or would, at best, half-ass it. Maybe you have better luck with them, but for my job, I work on a large legacy app as well as various microservices and the LLMs miss things all the time. I have a system I use that does make them perform better, but you still gotta watch em like a hawk.
It’s not fair criticism. It’s just anti ai rhetoric.
The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.
I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.
Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.
My family and I went down a very similar path, we were tired of all the ads and dark patterns when we just wanted to play simple puzzle games. We made a pretty similar site/app
https://puzzleparlor.fun
going there on an ios device will give you a link to the app store, both the site and app are free to use.
It has several puzzle games already and we're trying to release around one new one per month. Any feedback is welcome.
Crossjam is a fun one!
Based on the title, I was expecting the things I grew up calling logic puzzles, which some people call "logic grid" puzzles, e.g. https://www.allstarpuzzles.com/logic/00019.html (note: expired HTTPS certificate, but site doesn't ask for any login or anything, it just displays the puzzles) or https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/
When I was a kid, learning programming, I toyed with writing my own logic-puzzle solver program, but the challenge of turning words on their side defeated me at the time. Now it's just one line of CSS. :-)
Would you be interested in adding logic puzzles / logic grid puzzles? They're not that hard to create automatically; spend long enough on https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/ and you'll definitely notice that those puzzles are being auto-generated by an algorithm.
I did the same thing! I was playing nonogram puzzles a lot in an ad-infested iPhone app, got sick of the ads, and replaced it with my own site:
https://karstendick.github.io/nonogram/
I’m personally invested in a Kakuro variant I have built, and a print book[0] in the past few years, manually. I have recently augmented the website with Claude Code.[1]
So I am in a position to notice a design choice that I made appear in a somewhat substantially vibe-coded collection.
Though not a globally unique or revolutionary design element, the diagonal pinstripe background in this site’s Kakuro looks surprisingly similar to my own.
[0] https://a.co/d/88Y82x6
[1] https://www.kakurokokoro.com
I did the same with a few of my favorite casino games (and to save some money)
https://roulette.free/ https://blackjack.free/ https://baccarat.free/
little less heady than your site! but i still enjoy to play the games for free lol
Nice, mobile layouts could improve… couldn’t bet in roulette
I had the same idea as well! https://puzzleparlour.co.uk/
There are still a couple of bugs to iron out, but people seem to like the original Gravity Words game.
Looks great. FYI, Claude has idunno, maybe 20-30 different strongly themed websites it knows how to make, and this newspaper aesthetic is one of them, and all the sites it does this way look exactly the same.
It's a good aesthetic for your site, and I thought it was a good one for one of my sites. But eventually I redesigned my site significantly when I saw that it's gonna be common among vibed-up website designs and they look exactly the same.
Yep, I feel ya. Good feedback. This is like version 3 of the home page. The first two looked very typical AI. I thought maybe a newspaper vibe might be cool as a throwback to the puzzles you'd do in the paper. But it does have some of those cookie cutter AI tells. I'm a software engineer by trade and not much of a designer honestly. This probably won't be the final form of the home page, I'd imagine.
I mean, it does look cool. Felt unique when I had landed on it. But then I saw another site that looked identical to mine and I moved on.
I'm the same as you, not much of a designer, I was kind of elated when I got some good, themed, opinionated designs for some of my sites that felt like it was coming out of a collaborative brainstorming session, and matched the vibe I wanted. And then let down when I worked out there's only a limited number of things I can get the LLM to express, and it's gonna be similar for others.
I hadn't seen star battle before. Was fun. Wanted to play another medium one so created an account and it opened up the same puzzle, so then i just clicked through what i remembered and now i'm way too high on the leaderboard. I feel like a fraud!
oh shoot! I'll look into that. Star Battle is the most recent puzzle game I added and I'm still working out the bugs!
the star battle interface diverges from penpa, puzpre, and puzzleteam in a number of basic ways that actively make the solving experience worse imo:
- having to switch between "star" and "exclude" modes is annoying on desktop, and most sites allow right click for placing "exclude" marks. it was a surprise that right click not only popped up the context menu but also placed a star (in a wrong spot, of course).
- counting mistakes doesn't make sense for a binary determination puzzle like star battle imo (or most logic puzzles for that matter). solving on paper doesn't count mistakes so what does a digital solving interface gain by doing so?
as someone who does a lot of logic puzzles (and thus would be in the market for buying a puzzle set) these usability obstacles make the inclusion of star battle feel like an afterthought.
Exactly, I also prefer when neighboring cells are automatically marked when you place a star
Also great and ad-free: https://cluesbysam.com/
My daughter and I play it most nights, and she has been developing her deductive reasoning quickly enough that she occasionally sees the next move first now.
I see this kind of thing as the future of SaaS. Passionate developers out competing incumbents on both quality and price. One off purchases from "1000 true fans" is enough to make the effort worthwhile. It's a win-win for indie devs and their customers.
I'm 99% sure this was an invalid Sudoku puzzle.
Just before putting the 2 in here (above the pencil 6), I put in 6 and it said Mistake, so I erased it and put 2. But... why wouldn't 6 be valid there?
https://imgur.com/a/aOnKbiT
EDIT: As per replies, "X" Sudoku is variant with a different rule. While I saw the diagonals "highlighted" in another color, I didn't know that rule. Perhaps it could be added to the page for those unfamiliar with this non-standard Sudoku variant?
Yeah, that Sudoku puzzle has multiple valid solutions, whereas the page only seems to accept a single one.
There's an extra constraint on that one: the two main diagonals must both have nine different digits. That's what makes it a single-solution puzzle.
Because there's already another 6 on the same main diagonal. This is an "X Sudoku" puzzle, which means that each main diagonal must have all 9 different numbers.
All I've never done the diagonals before... oops.
https://imgur.com/a/Dfxf9CJ (before picking 2 / 6 / 7.)
https://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudokux.aspx is a useful site. I'm personally a fan of the killer variety.
Its solver is interesting in showing the individual steps.
For the same puzzle, https://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudokux.aspx?bd=06039000804900150...
if you like sudoku, you owe it to yourself to check out the "cracking the cryptic" youtube channel and get introduced to the delightful world of variant sudoku.
Where are you sourcing all your puzzles?
I remember the blocker to a Sudoku app I was making in secondary school was just getting good puzzles. They're hard to make, particularly if you're signing up to make a new one every day. I guess you could create them with AI now, but you'd run significant risk of them being uncalibrated for difficulty or just outright invalid.
I always thought people generated sudokus with heuristics, e.g. the less numbers remain, the harder it is.
Nice puzzles, thanks letting me have a couple of fun minutes with those.
In the star battle (at least the medium I played) the solutions are non-unique and there you sometimes make random mistakes, which is a bit annoying. Unless I'm missing something because it's already late, but I'm quite sure.
It won't even let me play sudoku if I don't sign-in.
Anyone know of a free version of spelling bee?
How do you plan to keep it free from ads? I see it has accounts, if it was completely client side, it could have been forever free.
It doesn't cost me much to run. About $9/month for the VPS + domain and I run other apps on the same VPS. Just my little hobby server. It does have monetization though, but I give the first 25 puzzles of each type + difficulty for free and then you pay a few bucks to unlock the rest. Maybe I'm being too generous, but it's not a big deal really.
You need to make the leaderboard be daily and for a single daily puzzle. Otherwise there's no reason to check it.
If you want image nonograms (as opposed to randomized nonograms), you can try Nonoverse[1]; I made it for the same reasons.
[1]: https://lab174.com/nonoverse
Nice! I wanted to share a link to Ripple Effect Hard with my time (23:47), but it seems the URL only captures attempts, so there's no real way to link to the puzzle itself.
Might be useful to
- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or
- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)
Good feedback. I hadn't gotten to sharing puzzles yet and hadn't really thought of that. I'll have to look into it. Thanks!
I'll plug a little page that I (well, Claude) put together for bite-sized 4x4 Sudoku puzzles mixing popular variant constraints: https://yakymp.github.io/sudoku4x4/
Perhaps add "Tectonic" as a puzzle type? It's the same as Ripple Effect but it disallows diagonal repeats.
> Play in dark mode
Only after you create an account? Oh my lord
Not good? I'm not opposed to that. I just needed a place to put it and in the account settings seemed natural. Then there's no cookies or anything. The setting is just stored in the database.
Why not respect the browser/system's theme? No need for settings or javascript:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
good idea. I might switch it to do that instead.
How do you think it remembers your account? With a cookie
Love it! My only feedback is the many-squared puzzles are hard to play on a phone without a stylus (accidental misclicks are challenging with the small box size)
Wanted to add my puzzle engine built for TUI. I have 15 puzzles, zine printing, and daily/weekly seeded challenges. Love seeing more puzzles without corporate shilling being the bitter aftertaste.
https://github.com/FelineStateMachine/puzzletea
By the way, if you are interested in nonograms specifically, there is a great website nonograms.org that has tens of thousands nonograms (both B&W and color) and no ads.
Oh yeah, I think I've seen it before. I got some inspiration for some of the nonograms that I made from some different sites. Not all of the sites that I've seen have had a great UI, especially on mobile, which is why I wanted to add nonograms to this site specifically.
Or you could use https://krazydad.com/ which has been around for decades, contains interesting puzzles many of which are types the author invented, and isn't AI slop.
Why ask for an account / sign up at all?
You know if this site gets popular and takes off, you could probably monetize it...with ads
haha! no thanks :) I play it myself because it doesn't have ads and cause it has multiple puzzles that I like. It is monetized though. You get the first 25 puzzles for free in every puzzle type + difficulty, then you can pay a few bucks to unlock all of the rest. But this site has made $0 so far. It may never make anything, but at least I'll still have a place to play the puzzles :)
For those who like these types of puzzles, i made a benchmark called pencil puzzle bench
Testing AI model's ability to solve puzzles like these. https://ppbench.com/
Can play the puzzles and compare your timing and accuracy to many AI models on the leaderboards
Really cool! I went through the same frustration with multiplayer games so I built https://parlor.vqi.io
No monetization of any kind other than a slightly hidden donate button.
I like the WSJ/newspaper look of the site, nice!
Love the look of the site. I have also grown tired of ads showing up everywhere nowadays. I'd much rather spend a bit of money than be forced to watch through another ad.
For sure! I couldn't find an app with a good mobile UI without ads. I would've paid a few bucks for one, so I figured others might feel the same way.
Please copy the LinkedIn Games !
Oh yeah? I'll have to check them out. Good tip!
I second this suggestion.
Cool but why do I have to create an account to keep playing? I hit the back button to review the rules and now I can't even try the game out.
I also hate ads in games, ... and as another serious restriction I only play on thumb slide games (think 2048) that just make me think enough (i want to relax) so I and Fable 5 developed https://squishy.franzai.com/ (Design is Opus 4.8, iOS Frame also Opus 4.8 - as Fable was gone by then).
Now waiting already for a week for Apple greenlighting my iOS update for the level builder...
Well i like the theory but all of your nonograms are symmetrical or diamonds. Not exactly much of a puzzle
And what sort of monster doesn't have nonogram sizes in multiples of 5?
Haha, yeah, the early puzzles are pretty simple, but they do start to get more variety as you progress through them.
I hear ya. Maybe multiples of 5 would've been better. Mainly, I was trying to get a good mobile experience with as big of a board as I could. Perhaps not the best call.
Nice job! I made something similar, mostly for myself: https://www.vexling.com
Plan to keep it forever free :)
Nice! real cool! This site does have monetization, but I give the first 25 puzzles free for each difficulty level. So a good amount of free content and I'm still trying to add more games.
what was the hardest part of the puzzle validation logic detecting unique solutions or handling edge cases in user input?
I hate that it immediately flags your errors. First, because it doesn't forgive the casual finger slipping or forgetting if you are in pen or pencil mode. And then because it partially gives away the solution.
Tried the hard nonogram, it was way too easy and annoying that I wasn't allowed to see if there are harder ones.
I prefer Bicross RPG.
https://smallandnearlysilent.com/bicross/rpg/
Love it. Inspiring me to upgrade my puzzle game site.
After starting a nonogram level, it seems you can't go back to it because you're just prompted to sign up or log in. As mentioned already they're also shitty puzzles.
Unfortunately, these days, "Show HN" is a code phrase for vibe-coded and untested projects. I was optimistic for this one because I love puzzles.
I took a quick look at the source:
What's a monetization prompt?
It's referring to the fact that after you complete 25 puzzles of a specific difficulty, it'll prompt you to unlock all the puzzles for a couple bucks. Helps offset server costs to run the site. So the comment in the code is addressing if a user has viewed that prompt or not. So not a "prompt" in the LLM sense.
Neat! I've recently built a Sudoku for my friends in Flutter as we were tired of ads showing up prior to games in most versions you can find on the Playstore. I gotta check out the the other games on this website too.
The homepage is a little overwhelming, other than that cool site
Good feedback. I've struggled with it honestly. Trying to make a good user experience, but it's tricky with 10 puzzles types and more coming. Is it the amount of puzzles that feels that way?
No, it is mostly the topbar and the blank space for some reason, maybe make the games more centric to the homepage? I am not very good at describing things
Gotcha, I appreciate the feedback. I'll see what I can do.
More clarification: The topbar, the newspaper asthetic
Are you blocking Tor?
Hmmm, if it is, I wasn't aware of it. Let me look into my rate-limiting settings that might block something like that.
Checked on it and I'm not blocking Tor. Are you getting issues? Maybe it's not handling the boost in traffic from this post
Not behind Tor here, but I just got a "406 Not Acceptable" with "Your browser is not supported". I'm running Firefox here, but on an older machine with an ESR v115 release. Does your site use particular functionality not supported in older Firefox?
Alrighty, I figured it out. You should be able to use it now. It's because I'm using Tailwind CSS version 4 and some of the things won't look perfectly in that browser version, but the site should be functional now for ya!
The "Hard" big diamond nonogram was not hard at all. Are you vibe-coding these?
The AI generated nonograms are actually better. I made the diamond myself sadly. They do get harder as you progress through them. I'm not good at pixel art, so I started with simple things like diamond and heart, but you're not the first to mention it, so I should've probably left those out.
Nice! A few word games would be cool: scrabble, boggle, etc.
Good feedback! I've built a wordle clone in the past (back when I had to write it all by hand!). Right now, I'm focused on logic puzzles and there are dozens more I'd like to add, but word puzzles may be coming at some point in the future. I had thought of them, but there's just so many different puzzles I want to put on there!
awesome. def need levels of difficulty for word puzzles against the AI; would be impossible to win otherwise :)
along those lines, you know what might be interesting is to have OSS models, including old ones, and select the model to play against (a bit like stockfish has different algos you can play chess against). This substitutes for levels of difficulty (assuming the old/small OSS models are worse, though when it comes to scrabble they might be just as good as any human in which case you would have to introduce some noise to degrade their performance
went to today's puzzle, was assigned an easy symmetrical nonogram. even though that was a disappointing start i was open to doing more, so i opened a hard one and was faced with a nonogram symmetrical on more axes than the easy one.
since a human would know these are bad nonograms, i have to assume this is all llm-generated.
i see you have already addressed similar comments, just sharing my two cents since i usually love puzzles.
Not really sure if you can call Nonogram a puzzle, when you give the answer right in the title.
fair point, maybe I should only show the title after the puzzle is solved. what do you think?
eventually hosting costs money, so ads will be needed
Now I just need an ad-free save the doggo from the bees site. =)
> Create a free account to keep playing. Sign up or log in to create an account, save your progress, and continue this difficulty.
And here we are again. A nice idea, ai generated, for grabbing email addresses... Not even trying to give it a human touch. Is this the new spam? Hundreds of sites and web apps forcing you to sign up with a temp email address for no good reason?
Should've asked for a photo ID!
Oh yes! This would fit in. "Please verify with Persona" will be the next level.
Haha! That'll be required for your coding agents soon enough sadly.
So "no ads, no subscription" on its front page is a lie? I am shocked, so very shocked.
No it's not a lie. It doesn't have ads or a subscription. You do need to login to continue playing more of the same type + difficulty for puzzles. There is an eventual paywall after you reach 25 puzzles + difficulty (so like after you've done 25 easy sudoku puzzles and you want to do more easy ones) for a couple bucks to help offset server costs. But it's a one-time thing. No monthly subscription at all. In all transparency, I've made $0 so far. No one has even reached the 25 free puzzle limit for any of the puzzles on there.
I think the messaging is just a bit confusing. You've said this had no ads and no subscription, and then people see you want them to create an account. If there's no money being paid, and no ads then the next conclusion is either you'll sell data or rug-pull later on. Clearly that isn't actually your intention.
Maybe try changing how you talk about the price a bit on the page. No one's going to be put off by knowing there's a lot of free content, and then later on you have a one-off fee to continue playing. But they will be put off if they don't understand how any of the pricing works, and if they feel like there's a catch you're not telling them about.
I get what you're trying to do, you want to offer something on the cheap and that's great. Just be open about when the payment is needed, and what that payment is. You'll likely get more sign ups from being open about it up front.
Thanks for your thoughts. I completely agree. Let me think of how I can incorporate that into the site's wording. I do want to be completely up front.
Just put in some simple way to block bot accounts but ditch the email subscription thing.
I don't have any need for your email address. You could put "foo@bar.com" in there if you want. The account is for tracking progress and eventually there is a paywall. I give 25 puzzles for free for every puzzle type + every difficulty, but after that, you pay a couple bucks to unlock the rest of the puzzles. Helps pay the server fees. Although I've made $0 so far and that's fine really. This is mostly just a fun little site for people to use.
Show HNs are places to discuss people's work respectfully and curiously, so attacks like this are particularly harmful here. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
You can make your substantive points without any of that, and if you had followed the HN guidelines in general, you would have:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html