# Hints and the Approach tab

> Hints are free and ladder one at a time; the Approach tab is the author's walkthrough - and the one place on the page a Big-O is allowed to appear.

Source: https://www.revquix.com/docs/practice/hints-and-approach
Last verified: 2026-09-04

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Two different kinds of help, and they are meant to be reached in this order: a hint when you are
stuck, the approach when you want to see how it is meant to be done.

## Hints

At the foot of the Description tab is a hint ladder. A problem carries up to five.

> **Note** - Hints are free and always will be
>
> No credits, no daily allowance, no account required. Charging for a nudge at the moment somebody is
> closest to giving up is the opposite of what this is for.

They open **one at a time** - the button offers the next unopened one, not all of them at once. That
is the whole point of a ladder: you stop at the one that unsticks you rather than reading five and
being handed the answer. Nothing enforces it, though. A hint is not a secret.

If you are signed in we record _how many_ you opened, so the count can sit alongside a solve. "You
solved this after two hints" is useful self-knowledge; it is not a mark against you and it is not
shown to anybody else.

A problem with more than five hints does not exist. Past that it stops being a nudge and becomes a
walkthrough, which is the next tab's job.

## The Approach tab

The author's explanation of how the problem is meant to be solved: the intuition, usually a brute
force worth understanding before discarding, and the approach they were aiming at.

It carries **who last updated it and when**. A walkthrough written against a signature that has
since changed is worse than no walkthrough, so the date is on screen rather than buried.

> **Note** - Not every problem has one
>
> An empty Approach tab is normal, not an error. The tab says so.

### The target complexity

Above the walkthrough - and shown **even when no walkthrough has been written** - is the complexity
the author declared for the problem:

> Aim for `O(n)` time, `O(n)` space.

This is the most useful thing on the tab if you are stuck on how to _improve_ a working solution,
because it tells you what you should be reaching for before you read a word of anybody's method.

> **Warning** - This is the only Big-O on the whole page, and it is a declaration
>
> It is the author's statement about **the problem** - what a good solution achieves. It is not an
> analysis of your code.
>
> Nothing on Revquix will tell you the complexity of what _you_ wrote, because deciding that
> automatically is not possible in general. What we do instead is measure - see [how fast is my solution](https://www.revquix.com/docs/practice/how-fast-is-my-solution), which
> prints no symbols and reports what a clock actually did.

## Related

- [Asking AI for help](https://www.revquix.com/docs/practice/asking-ai-for-help) - When the hint has not helped and the approach has not either.

- [How fast is my solution](https://www.revquix.com/docs/practice/how-fast-is-my-solution) - The measured half of complexity.