This is usually my approach when I'm playing too much of a game. I cracked my sudoku addiction by writing a solver. Got a lot less fun when I could tell my computer to solve it how I would solve it.

Haha, I did this for Wordle - same result!

I carefully refrained from building an actual word-ladder solver, for that reason - instead I have a little dictionary-explorer script which will show me the next two layers of the tree, should I get stuck.