Deep Blue

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.

Second Order Effects of AI: Cheng Lou

Oct 28, 2024 · 21:46

Cheng Lou explores how to anticipate second-order effects of AI by examining who is learning, widening information bandwidth, and extrapolating quantity to extremes. He uses chess and Go as examples where AI initially seemed to end human play but actually improved it, likening this to Conway's Game of Life's emergent behavior. He argues AI can aid human learning in drawing through stroke auto-completions and in music via indirect manipulation of spectrograms, shifting focus from automation to personal skill development. He envisions personalized AR language translation to replace one-size-fits-all text, and critiques current UI designs by proposing machine-learned gesture interpretation that considers full context. Finally, he extrapolates generating thousands of AI-curated UI layouts at design time, then using classification at runtime to deliver dynamic, context-aware interfaces, moving beyond static media queries.