Comment by FergusArgyll

With a bit of practice and enough ciphertext you can half-decode a simple Caesar cipher that still spaces between words in your head. There's only so many letters in English that double, only a few letters that can stand words themselves ("a", "i"), "the" will tend to stand out, and if you only work out the most common 10 letters or so most of the rest will fall into place.

Recently I ran a bit of an "escape room" concept with some kids at a campground where I had a secret message that was Caesar ciphered, where we were handing out the letter/symbol combinations as prizes for completing the other challenges, and I made sure not to hand out the actual message until they were done collecting the keys because otherwise some clever clog would very likely have short-circuited the entire thing and worked it out without the key at all. I did dump all the letters I didn't use into the message into an "authorization code" at the end which in principle they could only have worked out which letters were in it but not the order, but still, that was not the intended route today.