My all-time favorite word game is called 'Wordiest'. It was an earlyish Android game with a pretty simple mechanic: You get 14 Scrabble-style tiles and need to make the two highest-scoring words you can. Wordiest had a really nice visualization showing how you scored relative to 100 other previous players. It was implemented with a cached word and score database that worked entirely offline. It was ideal for long plane flights.
A number of years ago, I switched my primary phone to iOS. Wordiest was one of the few things I missed from Android. Somewhere along the way, the developer, "Concreterose" shut down. Google pulled Wordiest from the play store. And that was that.
Sometime early this year, I decided to build a new version of Wordiest as a mobile-first web app. I called it Anagrammatic. I spent a couple weeks on it. It was ok. Getting the drag and drop right was a pain in the neck. But it basically worked. It wasn't as fun as Wordiest and didn't have the cool after-game visualization of how you did relative to all those other players.
Late last week, OpenAI shipped ChatGPT 5.2. They claimed that it was really good at code. Looking around for tasks to throw at it, I decided it was time to try a "too-hard" task.
Friday night, I downloaded a copy of the packaged Android APK for the last release of Wordiest and handed it to Codex + ChatGPT 5.2:
Once I gave it the reverse engineering tools, it got to work. After about half an hour, I had a playable version of the core game.
The funniest moment of the whole experience was just after I told it that I wanted 100% parity with the Android implementation. It stopped me and asked if we really wanted to add ads and an in-app purchase to remove those ads. I gave it permission to skip that.
A few more hours of Codex grinding and occasionally checking in with me and...we were basically done.
Android:
iOS:
Android:
iOS:
This whole time, I have written zero lines of code. I have read zero lines of code.
I've made some high-level architectural decisions and I've done some play-testing.
You can read the implementation plans Codex put together.
About 80% of my "person-time" on this project has been working through glitches in the tile shapes that GPT 5.2 built. The first version of the tiles was almost right...but not perfect. I spent a couple of hours (while I was doing other work) checking in on its many, many failing attempts to fix the tile borders before it finally nailed them. I should have kept screenshots. There were a bunch of hilarious mistakes.
This is one of the weirdest things about using agentic development tools. My intuition for what's easy and what's hard is completely shot.
Reverse engineer an Android game, figure out all the gameplay, every layout weird, every UI behavior, the compressed wordlist, and the score formats.
"No problem."
Port all of that to Swift and SpriteKit?
"Piece of cake."
Now, center the letter a little bit better and make the rounded border on the tile have space for tile bonuses?
"I'm trying boss, but this is really, really hard. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'll keep at it. But yikes."
But, at the end of the day, I had a playable recreation of the Wordiest I knew and loved. The only question was...what could I do with it?
I reached out to Wordiest's author, Darrell Anderson. He, very graciously, gave me his blessing to release this new version of Wordiest and even told me a bit about how he'd built the cool offline scoring system back in the day.
Over the past couple days, I've had a few friends playing the TestFlight version of the game. My dad told me that it works much better than the web based version I built last spring. Then I had to explain to him that I didn't actually do any of the engineering.
Wednesday afternoon, I threw caution to the wind and sent "Wordiest Classic" to the Apple App Store's notoriously fickle review process. I didn't expect much, but figured that they'd give me a list of tasks to work through if I wanted to distribute Wordiest publicly.
I was not expecting the response Apple sent a day later.
You can check out the source at https://github.com/obra/wordiest or you can just download and play the game on your iPhone.