How AI won our November newsletter competition, and the implications

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How AI won our November newsletter competition, and the implications Part one of a four-part series of blogs
Our November newsletter competition asked you to create a system to construct word chains - this blog shows how our winner used Claude to create an impressive solution How AI won our November newsletter competition, and the implications (this blog) Showcasing the solution to the problem How to run the system How the system was created in Claude, and the lessons it holds for us

How AI won our November newsletter competition, and the implications

Part one of a four-part series of blogs

Our November newsletter competition asked you to create a system to construct word chains - this blog shows how our winner used Claude to create an impressive solution

How AI won our November newsletter competition, and the implications (this blog)
Showcasing the solution to the problem
How to run the system
How the system was created in Claude, and the lessons it holds for us

Posted by Andy Brown on 28 November 2025

Last month we asked you to write a system to see if you could get from one word to another by changing one letter at a time. For example you can get from SLATE to ROOFS like this:

SLATE ==> SLATS ==> SLOTS ==> SOOTS ==> ROOTS ==> ROOFS

We only received two answers, so you won't be seeing many more competitions like this! Congratulations to Jon O'Neill of Dale Underwriting Partners: not only was his name picked out of the randomised Excel sorting hat, but I also felt his solution was more elegant too.

A note of sympathy to the losing contestant: his Python solution was excellent, and also hand-coded, whereas the winner used Claude Code throughout. There is a moral in this somewhere ...

I think Jon's approach and solution show how you can use AI tools to write whole systems, so the rest of this blog now presents it as a case study, showing how Jon solved the problem and considering what messages this holds for us humans.

Parts of this blog
How AI won our November newsletter competition, and the implications (this blog) Showcasing the solution to the problem How to run the system How the system was created in Claude, and the lessons it holds for us