Cryptic Common

by Vohlenzer

A word game I enjoy goes as follows:

Use normal Articulate rules to describe the following words to the other players

  • Orange
  • Apple
  • Raspberry
  • Blackberry

Once they have answered all the words then they must guess the:

  • common theme: fruits
  • cryptic theme: technology companies

Generating puzzles with Claude Code

I wanted to systematically generate these Cryptic Common sets and I set about using Claude Code to generate them. Particularly I wanted to give subagents a go.

I imagined a pipeline of

  1. proposed themes (fruits, cars, movies, gods)
  2. studies (an exploration of a theme, various examples)
  3. combinations (of studies to try and find a set of 4 for Cryptic Common)
  4. reviews (of combinations to see if they're any good)

I had this article on LLM daydreaming in mind.

So I configured a directory as follows

cryptic-common\
  CLAUDE.md
  themes\
  studies\
  combinations\
  reviews\

Each theme, study, combination or review would be a markdown file. The CLAUDE.md detailed the rules of the game and the expected format of markdown files in each folder. I then set about creating four sub-agents to populate those folders with content:

  • theme-proposer
  • theme-study-generator
  • combination-generator
  • combination-reviewer

Each agent apart from the first is just picking up some content from a previous directory and creating content in it's target directory. In this way we're "leaning on the file-system" and don't require any special tooling.

One proposed theme was dance-styles. Let's look at what was produced.

./themes/dance-styles.md
./studies/dance-styles.md
./combinations/dance-styles--olympic-sports.md
./combinations/dance-styles--music-genres.md
./combinations/cocktails--dance-styles.md
./reviews/dance-styles--olympic-sports.md
./reviews/dance-styles--music-genres.md
./reviews/cocktails--dance-styles.md

Three other themes: olympic-sports, music-genres and cocktails were considered. Here's what it came up with.

Rejected Dance Styles - Olympic Sports

  • Boxing
  • Skating
  • Breaking
  • Curling

Approved Dance Styles - Cocktails

  • Mambo
  • Rumba
  • Bolero
  • Cha-Cha

Approved Dance Styles - Music Genres

  • Jazz
  • Disco
  • Salsa
  • Swing

The agents are encouraged to produce bad output as well as good, we need the reviews/dance-styles--olympic-sports.md file to exist so the agent doesn't try that combination again. The dance-styles--cocktails combination is a great example of what we're looking for. The reviews/dance-styles--music-genres combination is a little too close, really the common and cryptic themes should be orthogonal to each other. I'll have to update the combination-reviewer agent to account for this.

So... it works!

Take Aways

This is an excellent way to hit the rate limit on a Claude Code Pro subscription. In 3 sessions these agents managed to generate 120k words of content which yielded 27 approved reviews.

The Haiku model is just fine for this sort of work.

Don't give sub-agents access to more tools than they need. When the sub-agents had execute access they started trying to make all sorts of python / shell scripts to help them find combinations. When they only had access to read and write then they just got on with their job.

Puzzles

Here are some Cryptic Common sets for you to try:

  • Ruby
  • Jade
  • Pearl
  • Amber
  • Mars
  • Milky Way
  • Galaxy
  • Starburst
  • Champagne
  • Bordeaux
  • Burgundy
  • Chianti
  • Elle
  • Grace
  • Harper
  • Vanity
  • Mercury
  • Saturn
  • Atlas
  • Titan

Good luck!