Uncrossy creator here. Yes, I design each by hand using a highly custom editor that I built to help with many of the common challenges. People keep asking me if it's a job that AI could do, but I think it would be really hard to get right. There's a lot of craft in building the shape of the puzzle and picking words that allow as many spaces as possible to get filled in.
That's super cool! Thanks for explaining. Just to clarify myself - when I was thinking of automation I was not thinking of AI, or at least not how its popularly understood these days. I was thinking more like how 2D mazes can be automatically made by non-AI methods. Uncrossy would need a kind of constraint solver that can navigate words lexically and the spatial intersection of words (and their possible slides). I'm certainly not telling you anything you don't know. There are some algorithms for these (general) kinds of constraint satisfaction problems and they long pre-date "AI", but I think the application to uncrossy and refinement would be quite challenging.
