Puzzle Generator Rejects 99.7% of Output by Design, Solves 5 in 84ms

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A software developer built a Go CLI tool called verigen that generates cryptarithmetic puzzles, where letters represent unique digits forming valid sums. The tool deliberately makes no correctness guarantees at the generation stage, offloading all validation to a separate verifier that performs exhaustive searches. Out of 1,947 attempts, only 5 puzzles pass, with rejections split across no unique solution (39.55%), no solution (35.70%), and exceeding 10 distinct letters (24.50%). Despite the 0.26% acceptance rate, the entire process completes in just 84 milliseconds, making brute-force generation more practical than building a smarter generator. The developer argues this generator-verifier split is especially relevant when the generator is a large language model, where improving output quality is costly but running a fast verifier thousands of times is not.

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