Alarm is a good guess. On average I can solve a wordle in 3.6 turns when I start with this guess.

I used to use “stare” or “stale” as the starting guess when I played Wordle, thinking you’d want to start off with the most common letters, like R-S-T-L-N-E from Wheel of Fortune.

"stale" was used a while back - since then I've been starting with "slate"

But now you can use it again!

Repeated letters are wasted utility. Wouldn't that make it suboptimal for a first move?

Suboptimal - likely. There is some utility: a green letter is more useful than a yellow. Checking for a in two locations when a is a very commonly used letter is __useful__. Still likely much more useful to check for the presence of a fifth letter than a chance at knowing more precisely the location of an a.

I used to use alert, until it was the word one day (got it in one!). Then I switched.

Apparently I should switch back, since it could be the word again.

I always used the previous day's word as the starting word. IMHO that should have been how the game worked all along.

Why would you rob yourself of the chance of a wordle-in-one?