TeXCCChess: How Coding Agents Wrote a Chess Engine in Pure TeX
Summary
TeXCCChess demonstrates a complete chess engine written entirely in TeX, running in pdflatex, using a register-based VM, precomputed tables, and a UCI wrapper to test via Elo comparisons. The post details design decisions, TeX-specific pitfalls, and a multi-session development process with Elo estimates around 1280, illustrating how AI agents can produce sophisticated software under extreme constraints. It highlights insights into AI-assisted programming, language-limited environments, and novel approaches to no-code/low-code experimentation in code generation.