3 Letter Daily started as a joke in a UX design group chat. You know the one — the one that’s been hijacked by Wordle stickers since 2022, where every morning starts with three or four people racing to post their Wordle 1,770 5/6sticker before 9am. Someone always asks “what’s going on with these little stickers?” Someone always answers “play it and find out.” Eventually, someone snaps.
It’s a universal modern condition. A group chat — yours, ours, theirs — gets quietly colonised by a single daily ritual. Yellow squares. Green squares. Black squares. Wordle 1,770 5/6. It happens slowly, then all at once, until one day you scroll back through three days of conversation and realise nobody has said a real sentence to each other in 72 hours.
The UXD & Wordle group chat hit terminal velocity sometime in spring. Someone new joins and asks the question — what are these little stickers? — and gets told to play and find out. The veterans defend the ritual. The skeptics question its existence. Things escalate. Memes are deployed. Someone calls UX a guessing game. Someone takes that personally.
“I’m actually going to make a 3 letter wordle.”
— Richard, in the group chat, instead of working
Here, restored from an iPhone screen-record and lightly redacted, is the thread that became this game. We’ve kept the order, the timestamps, the spelling mistakes, and the moment Aiden submits a 20-guess solve to a 3-letter puzzle. We’ve changed the visuals because we thought our app should eat its own dog food.
I sent that “I’m actually going to make a 3 letter wordle” message at 09:45 on a Friday. By Sunday night the game was live at 3letterdaily.com — design system, brand identity, daily word logic, sign-in, streak tracking, share cards, the lot. One person. One weekend. About a hundred prompts and a slightly concerning amount of coffee.
It used to take a small team a quarter to ship something like this. I built it between kiddy party drop offs, going to the park for a nap. Karaoke, a wicked hangover and more park visits with 99’s of course. Claude Design did the brand and screen states. Claude Code wrote the Next.js app, the Supabase schema, the share-card generator, and the keyboard that mirrors tile state. I mostly typed sentences and clicked accept.
Make of that what you will. The robots are coming for our jobs, allegedly, and on the evidence of this weekend they’re going to be annoyingly polite about it. In the meantime: there’s a new word at midnight. Bring it to your group chat. Hijack someone’s Saturday morning. Make Amit guess.
Design
Claude Design
Identity system, screen states, brand assets, typography choices, this very page.
Engineering
Claude Code
Next.js + TypeScript app, daily word logic, share-card generation, the keyboard that mirrors tile state.
Hosting
Vercel
Edge runtime, automatic deploys from main, the preview URLs we shared in the same group chat.
Database & Auth
Supabase
Daily word table, user streaks, sign-in via Google. Row-level security so nobody can see tomorrow’s word.
Display Type
FT Baile
Designed by François Rappo. Ten cuts, all licensed. The whole brand sits on its shoulders.
Body & Mono
Space Grotesk · Space Mono
By Florian Karsten and Colophon Foundry, via Google Fonts. The grown-up voice in the room.