I’m very new here and maybe I even got to the wrong part of te forum.
Tldr; Have exercises start with a skeleton with the full interface for the tests set up correctly. Should even pass a first, trivial, test.
I learned about Exercism as I need to learn Ocaml so I do that track of exercises. I’m only on the 3rd. The first two I did out of the description only but the third I struggled with a long time before I realized there was no way I could do it without looking at the tests. My main problem was that I could not get the interface right to the solution function as it was not trivial, so you get compiler errors when running the tests. The test also do its best to obfuscate what the result type shall be, to a beginner, which also does not help. I just felt I spent a really long time on the ‘wrong problem’.