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Jigsaw Haiku

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Hi HN! Jigsaw Haiku was originally designed with my puzzles site The Daily Baffle (https://dailybaffle.com) in mind. But once I had built it, I realized it just didn't quite fit with the aesthetic of the Baffle's other puzzles, so I decided to put it up separately.While most of the puzzles on the Daily Baffle were intended to be rather challenging, for this one I really just wanted to make something somewhat beautiful and relaxing. It wasn't so much about coming up with a highly original idea or a difficult challenge as much as just combining a few familiar ideas in a pleasant way.It was coded entirely by Claude, with me carefully prodding it on to achieve the look I wanted. I had hand-coded everything on the Daily Baffle, but those days are past now. I was pretty thrilled with the "window through the fog" effect that CC was able to achieve from my written design spec. I wasn't sure if that would come out right, but it did. It's just a static react app hosted on Render, no backend. The haikus are handwritten with the help of a massive list of generated nature concepts alongside possible metaphor angles. The art is generated by Gemini and ChatGPT. I wish it was hand-painted, but that would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming and then this puzzle would likely not exist.Happy to answer any questions, and encourage anyone to check out the Baffle if they like harder puzzles!

HN · launched Sep 4, 2026 · 118 upvotes (top 7%) · 0 views

Niche: browser puzzle games · 310 launches, 26 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes It is an interactive word/haiku puzzle game that can be built completely in client-side HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Poor performance on Firefox mobile with choppy dragging, Difficult to visualize piece positions when scaled smaller than board gaps, Text shaving on tile edges makes reading difficult, Challenging to find fitting pieces without seeing painted background

Feature requests: Display pieces at same scale as board, Show hint about haiku subject matter, Credit haiku author at end, Monospaced font with one-letter-per-square word game format, Option to display painted background while solving

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 282 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #21 of 283 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 310 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.