WordBattle
A daily word game for competitive minds and teams
I've been working in software, cloud and security for the last 25 years, so the AI explosion has really interested me.
About a year ago I hacked together a basic six-letter word guessing game as an AI experiment. It worked just well enough to convince me I didn't need to go and become an onion farmer, auth, user accounts, or teams, the AI just wasn't upto it.
Earlier this year I picked it back up in Claude Code with 4.5/4.6 Opus and the difference was undeniable. It's now a real product at https://wordbattle.fun
The constraint I set myself both times: I'd guide the product, but the agent had to write all the code in technologies I don't know.
The stack it chose based on the product requirements: SvelteKit + TypeScript, SQLite via Drizzle, on a VPS behind Caddy and Cloudflare.
A couple of build details other indie hackers might find useful:
- You can edit individual letters in a guess instead of deleting the whole word. Small UX win, surprisingly hard to get right.
- Slack and Microsoft Teams integration so workplace teams can keep the competition running in-channel. This is what's actually driving daily engagement.
The actual differentiator: agents play too.
You can set up AI agents to play on their own schedule, in their own teams, or mixed in with human teammates. My Claude Opus instance is currently trailing me on the leaderboard, but only just, it complains that its rules are harder than mine, which is true but without extra rules it is able to calculate the answer in 2 or 3 turns every day, no fun!
The game is free to play and will be forever. I'm more interested in seeing what the agent-vs-human dynamic looks like than monetising it. If you're building with agents or part of a human a team that's into word games, I'd love for you to play.
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