I’ve been doing the OverTheWire Bandit over the past couple of days and have become stuck on the earlier levels. I deem this very embarrassing as this is supposed to be an “easy” and “recommended for beginners” type of puzzle that requires hands on understanding of the Linux terminal. But I have been using Linux for 9 months now, I wouldn’t do the most complicated things (other than break my whole os) only the things required to make my overall user experience somewhat enjoyable. Now this makes me very sad to come to the conclusions that I may be below the average Linux beginner which I didn’t know was possible according to my knowledge. I am only asking of tips and tricks to these puzzles and maybe to positive reinforcement to make feel better about myself. Now I will not tolerate spoilers as in the official rules of OverTheWire clearly states, and I hope you will follow this rule for the better sake of my learning and understanding of the Linux terminal ( and for the sake of the game itself)
I generally agree with you that the projects could be more accessible. I also believe that these projects exist to do one thing, which is create a solution to a problem and share it with others.
As for your learning and explaining what the various bash command chains do: Explaining bash commands is actually one of the few things I would say AI (especially local/self-hosted LLMs) are REALLY good at.
There are lots of obscure options for every bash command, and having used a lot of LLMs for work, most LLM models can use and explain these bash commands, piping, and exit conditions quite well.
Not everyone wants to use AI, which I can understand. But, if you’re going to use AI, use it to break down more complex things and explain them to you.