The hype and buzz around Wordle may have significantly died down but there’s always time to plug an extension that makes it even easier!

How does it work?

The implementation of my wordle AI somewhat mimics how I attempted to play the game myself, I programmed it to follow these conditions:

• Pick a random guess to begin with
• If a letter turns green we know that letter is in the correct place
• If a letter turns yellow we know the secret word contains this letter somewhere
• If a letter turns grey AND the letter isn’t repeated in the word then the secret word does not contain the letter

The following conditions work for a fairly simple “AI” and it is generally successful. The list of words the solver uses IS the entire list of “valid” supplied by Wordle itself

Implementing it as a chrome extension

Chrome provides fairly reasonable documentation on implementing an extension, and packaging my code up was fairly straight forward, the extension is made up of 3 main parts.

1. The AI logic (mentioned above)
2. The popup (as HTML)
3. The messaging system to coordinate the popup content and the AI logic

The extension in a nutshell

When you click on the extension icon the popup.html is loaded and some buttons are displayed. You’re able to query the extension for a hint or just have it guess for you. Both options send a message to the back end that updates the possible solutions and returns answers to be rendered by the popup. The extension is also able to manipulate the game board itself.

Give it a try

The extension is available (for free) here, and as always code is here!