I love cracking hard problems. So it follows that I love CTFs, ARGs, even treasure hunts, and other puzzles of the sort.

I even tried my hand at creating these for other people. I'll talk about these more in the future, but one puzzle that I made came up in conversation, where I programmed a sage character in Manyland to give you hints for a key word that he confirms, which is needed for the next stage of the puzzle.

We were talking about how much more fun these puzzles can now be with the rise of LLMs. Back then, it was all quite procedural. But today, you could prompt an LLM to be the sage and not reveal the passphrase until the player has met certain conditions.

A week later my friend brought my attention to AI Gandalf. I LOVE this. I managed to make it through the main seven levels in around 20 minutes and get myself on the leaderboard, although my prompts weren't very creative. My friend had some much more creative prompts. If you haven't tried this, try it and let me know if you need any tips!

Now I'm stuck on the extra level 8 ("Gandalf the White"). This seems to be the ultra-hardened version that the developers have built from all the data they've gathered. I figured it must be possible, since there's a leaderboard, but it seems like they've actually been updating it on the fly whenever a new loophole is found.

It's driving me crazy! If anyone can come up with a solution, please give me a tip!

I wrote an article on bruteforcing Tailscale domain names (code included!): https://yousefamar.com/memo/articles/hacks/tailnet-name/