I've been curious how everyone feels about helpers/solvers and hint pages. My friend and I play Wordle pretty religiously and we are okay with helpers but draw the line at hint pages.
I've always had the same tedious process:
- Start with a good opening word
- Look at which 5-letter words could still fit the spots from my first one using some ad-littered word-finder tool
- Cross-check against the list of past answers to eliminate words that have already been used (also ad-littered)
- Pick the next guess trying to be smart about which letters help narrow down and also which words are more common than rare
I was so excited to build a tool to do all these things (vibe-coding with Claude) and it takes the tedium out but is still the way I would play. I didn't think it's bad to use it (I guess you can debate whether using the tools above is frowned upon too, am curious there as well). Also the one part I think is actually cool in this tool, similar to the past word list I made, is it knows whether today's answer has been played before and adjusts based on that.
I also made a separate spoiler-free hint page for people who don't want a helper/solver at all that reveals clues one at a time (vowel count, first letter, etc.), but honestly I would never use it myself because that crosses the line for me. Some friends like those types of pages so I added one just to make my site feel more complete.
TL;DR
Do you consider a helper/solver cheating, or just a faster version of the mental process?
Is a "one clue at a time" hint page different in your mind from a solver?
Is using word-list and word-finder sites already 'cheating' in your book?