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Can AI Copy It?

Can AI copy

Wordle

Five letters, six guesses, once a day.

One shot
Verdict
One shot
Time to copy
an afternoon
Category
◆ Games & toys
Source
Proprietary

The prompt

Written to be pasted straight into an agent with no editing. It describes the whole job, including the parts that will go wrong.

Build a daily word game. A 5x6 grid, an on-screen keyboard, and a fixed answer per calendar day derived deterministically from a date seed against a curated answer list, with a larger list of valid guesses. Colour each tile green for correct position, yellow for present elsewhere, grey for absent, resolving duplicate letters correctly: mark greens first, then allocate remaining yellows against the unmatched letter pool only. Persist progress and a streak in local storage. Generate an emoji-grid share string that reveals no letters. Support keyboard input and screen readers.
Open inClaude ↗Terminal agents take it from the clipboard.

What copies cleanly

  • All of it. The grid, the keyboard, the colouring rules, the daily seed, the share string.
  • This is the standard demonstration project for a coding agent, and it works on the first attempt.

Where it stops

  • The duplicate-letter rule, which is the one thing almost every copy gets wrong. Two yellows for a word with one of that letter is the tell.
  • Nothing else.

What actually protects them

  • It was already copied several hundred times within weeks, so the moat was clearly not the code.
  • The daily ritual and the fact that everyone is playing the same puzzle, which is a property of being the one everyone plays.

Editor's note

The clearest natural experiment on this index. It was copied instantly and comprehensively, the copies were free, and the original was still bought for a seven-figure sum. Copyability and value are simply different axes.

Go and look at the original

We would rather you formed your own opinion than took ours. They built the thing; we only measured it.

nytimes.com ↗

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