Hints and solutions

cmetal is built so you can get exactly as much help as you want, and no more. Two mechanisms — progressive hints and earned solutions — sit on a spectrum from "gentle nudge" to "here is the answer", and you control where on it you land.

Progressive hints

Every exercise ships a ladder of hints, ordered from the gentlest nudge to almost the full answer. In watch mode, press h to reveal the first. Press h again for the next. Hints accumulate on screen — you never lose an earlier one — and you decide how far down the ladder to go.

From the CLI you can ask for a specific depth without entering watch mode:

cmetal hint pointers1              # first hint
cmetal hint pointers1 --level 2    # first two hints

The idea is deliberate: a good first hint reframes the problem ("sizeof on a pointer gives the pointer size, not the array size") rather than handing you the fix. Reach for the next one only when the current one hasn't unstuck you.

Earned solutions

When an exercise passes, its official solution unlocks in my_solutions/. This is the moment to compare: your fix against the reference, side by side. There is often more than one correct answer, and seeing a second one is where a lot of the learning happens.

Two design choices keep this honest:

• Solutions unlock only after you solve the exercise. You can't peek your way past a problem — the file simply isn't there until you've earned it.
• Solutions are stored obfuscated on disk (.c.enc files), so casually browsing the repository on GitHub or in your editor never spoils an answer. cmetal decodes the one you earned into my_solutions/ when you pass.

To re-open a solution you've already earned:

cmetal solution pointers2

Starting over

To redo a single exercise — pristine file back, marked pending again, everything else kept:

cmetal reset pointers1

For a clean slate — pristine exercises, no revealed solutions, progress reset — use it without a name:

cmetal reset

That restores my_exercises/ from the pristine exercises/ and clears .cmetal-state.txt. Your workspace (or checkout) is otherwise untouched.