Building a Chess Coach — Anant Dole and Asbjorn Steinskog, Take Take Take
May 13, 2026 · 18:22
Anant Dole and Asbjørn Steinskog of Take Take Take, Magnus Carlsen's chess app, built an AI chess coach that keeps LLMs as translators rather than reasoners. Stockfish evaluates positions, tactical and positional detectors extract forks, pins, and structural weaknesses, and the LLM only converts those structured signals into English—preventing hallucination. They target sub-3-second latency using Gemini Flash. When a user flags bad commentary, it posts to Slack and injects into a running Claude Code channel via MCP. Claude investigates, modifies prompts or detectors, regenerates commentary, and asks clarifying questions. They run automated evals across 16 scenarios: Gemini Flash at 75%, Claude thinking below 60%, GPT-5 Mini lower. Their key insight: separate data pipeline from language generation, and close the loop with autonomous agents.
