Sorta Game

Sorta is a Wordle-style daily game — one puzzle a day, no account, no login. Each puzzle is three quick rounds of five items ordered along a hidden scale, oldest to newest or smallest to largest, capped by a bonus round where you name the single theme threading all three rounds together. It takes about three minutes and runs entirely in the browser, with streaks and stats kept in local storage. The player-facing runtime never touches the content database: the game ships a static, pre-approved bank of puzzles, so an upstream rate limit or outage can't take it down. The only model call in the request hot path grades your free-text bonus guess.

The interesting part isn't the game — it's the human-in-the-loop content factory behind it. Puzzle authoring is a full editorial pipeline built on Airtable and AI, with a strict Draft → Needs Review → Approved → Archived status model. A model generates a fully structured session against a JSON schema — theme, three ordered rounds, per-round reasoning, and the hidden bonus theme with scoring keywords — while letter assignment and shuffling happen in code so answers never leak into round data. A second model pass acts as an internal editor, scoring the candidate against a checklist and returning notes and concrete fixes; anything under 85 confidence drops back to Draft, and a weak session can loop through its own review in a generate → critique → revise pass. A deterministic, explainable similarity check — no AI — flags puzzles that echo an existing theme or share too many items, and near-repeats scheduled too close together.

The result is a division of labor: AI does the heavy lifting on ideation, first-draft authoring, and a critique pass, while a human editor stays the sole gate on what ships. Nothing is ever auto-approved. Editors playtest, star-rate, and approve from the playtest view; a sequential schedule assigns puzzle #N to day N, with a pause that freezes the calendar without ever skipping a puzzle. Approve, sync, deploy.