Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
>>Some people say the biggest difference between an engineer and a senior engineer is not on the code they write, but on the senior engineer ability to figure out ways to not write code.<p>YES!!<p>The thing I spent the most time on when coding was to avoid writing code.<p>*  All code takes longer to run than the no-op<p>*  The greatest performance/speed gains are not from optimizing, but from entirely eliminating chunks of code.<p>*  All code is habitat for bugs, the more habitat, the more...<p>*  More code can unnecessarily obfuscate the structure of the app, and ability to reason about it<p>Some time later, the same principle came up in a seemingly very different field of sportscar racing, when my driving coach asked me "What are the things you do that slow the car down?".  I thought of some mistakes I was making, but he pointed me to the big basics - "turning and braking", followed by discussion that the most basic thing to do was to avoid turning and braking.  Now obviously, some of both will be needed as soon as you approach the end of the starting straight — the point is to do only the absolute minimum, and that often takes a LOT of work to figure out how to NOT do something.<p>Same applies for writing code - avoid it at all costs, and write only the absolutely required minimum.<p>It is effort well spent