Building better chess analysis software

4 months ago 6

Throughout 2025, I have been providing updates on building the AI Chess Coach. The most recent blog post explained how can you use the coach to analyze critical moments in your game.

To try out the AI Chess Coach go to https://app.chesscoach.dev/ and enter your email to create your profile.

Vibe coding

Initially, the software was built using a Python tech stack in early 2025. This made iterating on the UI easy, but limited. Modern libraries and styling could not be used. Because I work in AI, I have kept a close eye on new technologies like OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code.

Typically, refactoring a codebase from one language (Python) to another (Javascript) can take team of people weeks if not longer. Using these new technologies, in about 24 hours, I was able to prompt my Python code into a Next.js application which allowed me to take advantages of many open source libraries that provide a modern design and UI. These type of rapid prompting was coined vibe coding by Andrej Karpathy a few months ago.

Now, lets deep dive into these new features; the application has three distinct segments:

Games selection
AI analysis
Piece traceability

Games selection

The games section allows you to retrieve your games from Lichess and chess.com. This was a core feature in the original app, however the games table is now more interactivity, visually appealing and simpler to navigate.

The “Analyzed” column shows which games you’ve already reviewed. For those games, you can quickly access previously identified critical moments. This feature is powered by per-user profiles, secure authentication, and a backend database that stores and retrieves your analysis.

AI Analysis

The heart of the AI Chess Coach is finding the critical moments in your game: it identifies four key points from the perspective of the color you played, spread across all phases and chosen for their significant evaluation swings.

In addition, to revamping the UI to be modern, an extra board is added to show what the best move is when a critical moment is highlighted. Furthermore, there is a now a concise summary headline providing the key takeaway of the moment.

There is also still the ability to toggle on voice and receive powerful voice commentary to mimic a chess coach!

Piece traceability

I have long wondered how often I moved specific pieces in a game. Thus, I added a “piece traceability” feature that tracks any piece moved two or more times. Surprisingly, in some games I lost, I’d moved the same knight up to a dozen times. While that finding alone is just anecdotal, the ultimate goal is to analyze many games to reveal broader movement trends.