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Show HN: Dense NYT style crossword puzzle generation with Rust and Claude

Hacker News - Sun, 06/07/2026 - 8:36pm

I’m a daily New York Times crossword player and I’ve built xword-pipeline with the goal of creating my own dense New York Times style crossword puzzles.

The pipeline consists of a Rust grid fill-engine and a Claude based clue-writer. The fill-engine generates candidate grid skeletons (default is 200) and fills them with words from the Crossword Nexus Collaborative Word List. The clue-writer uses Claude to generate multi-tiered clues (easy, medium, hard), explanations, and QA review the generated puzzles. The clue-writer explanation and/or QA steps can be skipped or the clue-writer can be skipped entirely if you want to write your own clues.

I’ve also created a crossword puzzle web app that can be used to test puzzles generated by the pipeline (https://wordfuzz.com/). The puzzles in the archive have all been generated with the pipeline. QA reviews did show issues with some of these puzzles but they should be solvable and I’ve left them as is so the quality of the pipeline can be accurately judged. You can run the pipeline yourself and use the test page ( https://wordfuzz.com/test) to test the puzzles you generate. The test page uses LocalStorage so nothing is uploaded to the server.

Note: The clue-writer requires an Anthropic API key and costs me an average of around $0.50 to fill a 15x15 grid with multiple-tiered clues and explanations. If you’d like to give the pipeline a try, run a single puzzle first and verify the cost is acceptable to you before generating multiple puzzles.

Any feedback on the pipeline would be appreciated. I would be great to hear if you’ve had success generating fun, playable crosswords or if you have any suggestions for improving the pipeline. Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440123

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Ask HN: What Happened to Hide?

Hacker News - Sun, 06/07/2026 - 8:33pm

The hide link seems to have disappeared from index pages. It’s still there on posts, but it doesn’t actually hide the post?

I regularly used the hide feature for things that I’m not interested in but don’t deserve to be flagged.

What gives?

E: seems to just not work on /classic.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440099

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Synstax – Smart Supplement Scheduling for iPhone

Hacker News - Sun, 06/07/2026 - 8:31pm

Synstax is an iPhone app for planning supplements: schedule routines, scan labels, catch conflicts, and track diet interactions. No account required.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440081

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Eighteen

Hacker News - Sun, 06/07/2026 - 8:24pm
Categories: Hacker News

Brain Appropriation

Hacker News - Sun, 06/07/2026 - 8:11pm

Article URL: https://brainappropriation.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48439962

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Today's NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Monday, June 8

CNET Feed - Sun, 06/07/2026 - 8:08pm
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 8.
Categories: CNET

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for June 8, #623

CNET Feed - Sun, 06/07/2026 - 8:06pm
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 8, No. 623.
Categories: CNET

AI Code Stitcher

Hacker News - Sun, 06/07/2026 - 8:00pm
Categories: Hacker News

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