Why I'm Building ClueDay in my 5-9 after my 9-5
A lifelong word game obsession, a Wordle habit that stopped challenging me, and a new skill called vibe coding.
The Background
I have been a word game person my whole life. Taboo in my Speech & Drama classes, Scrabble games with (un)healthy point systems, and Mumbai Mirror crosswords on Sunday mornings; if it involved letters or numbers and thinking, I was in.
The Premise
I wanted to learn more about popular tools like Lovable, Claude Code, Vercel, GitHub and decided to build something I could enjoy. Games are one of the simpler things to create because you already have a vision for how they should work. You have an intuition, and preferences built over time of playing a range of similar games in that genre.
AI has changed a lot about building products. "The traditional design thinking process is dead." "Anybody can build." "Prompt engineering is the future." "We will have billion-dollar solopreneurs."
Irrespective of where you fall on the spectrum of the AI-hype cycle, vibe coding has definitely made it easier to build 0→1 high-fidelity prototypes that can be launched at the click of a button.
Running with an Idea
Around the same time that I was getting into vibe coding I had the idea: a daily mystery word, revealed through clues you choose to uncover one at a time. I wanted to go beyond thinking of just 5-letter words, expand my vocabulary and really have fun.
In the graveyard of my vibe-coded apps at the same time, ClueDay felt like it would be something I would go beyond 0->1 with. It felt like the challenge I had been missing.
So I built it.
ClueDay — Every case starts closed. How quickly you crack it is up to you.