January 3, 2026
Checkmate or check crash?
Beating myself at chess
Tiny chess bot beats its maker—but crashes mid-castle and gets roasted by the crowd
TLDR: A coder made a tiny browser chess bot that beats its creator, but a bug caused an illegal-castle crash. Commenters roasted its pawn-happy style, asked for a finish screen, and debated old-school coding versus using AI tools—proof that minimalist projects spark big community energy.
One coder built a teeny-tiny chess bot in old-school C with zero frills and crammed it into a 6 KB browser toy you can play here. The vibe? Cozy netbook nostalgia and “it beats me!” realism. The crowd adored the minimalist flex—until the drama hit.
The comments quickly turned into a ringside roast. A user reported the bot trying to castle illegally and crashing the game, forcing a refresh. Cue the memes: “Checkmate? More like check-crash.” Others piled on with gentle burns, noting the bot’s obsession with pushing pawns like a toddler on a sugar rush, and suggesting a big “Checkmate!” finish screen for closure. Strategy critics didn’t hold back: it’s “terrible in the opening,” slightly less chaotic in the middle, and needs to consider its own safety instead of charging forward. One commenter called writing a chess engine “humbling,” while another stirred the pot by bragging they whipped up a decent engine using Claude (an AI assistant), igniting a mini-debate: retro DIY vs. AI-assisted speedruns.
The creator admitted tests came late and uncovered multiple bugs, which the crowd seized on as a teachable moment: write tests first, or the rook will run off with your castle. Verdict: charming project, spicy feedback, and a very public endgame—fix the castle, then bask in the cozy coding glow.
Key Points
- •The chess engine and AI are written in C with zero dependencies and fixed memory usage.
- •The core engine is under 600 lines; the AI is under 150 lines; compiled WebAssembly output is under 6 KB.
- •Development used late-90s-style terminal tools (GNU Screen, Vim, entr, w3m) on an Asus EeeBook X205T.
- •Testing was initially deferred but later implemented to fix en passant and castling bugs uncovered during refactoring.
- •Integration includes XBoard via CECP and browser support using cm-chessboard with WebAssembly; an XBoard client was built in under 100 lines of C.