Coding Agents Build Chess Engines From Scratch in Rust, C++, COBOL, Rocq, LaTeX, Brainfuck, and More
blog.mathieuacher.com
What happens when you ask coding agents to write a chess engine from scratch, with minimal guidance and you replicate the experiment across 12 programming languages: Rust? C++? COBOL?! Rocq!? LaTeX!!?? or even Brainfuck??!! Over the past weeks, I have been running exactly this experiment. The short take-away: coding agents can now generate functional, UCI-compliant chess engines from scratch across a wide range of languages, some reaching over 2000 Elo. To my knowledge, this is the first time coding agents have been shown to produce non-trivial, end-to-end software of this complexity (with no architecture document, no step-by-step guidance) and across languages as diverse as Rust, COBOL, and LaTeX. I couldn’t find prior art for a full playing engine in LaTeX, Brainfuck, or Rocq (formerly Coq; renamed with Rocq 9.0), yet coding agents produced playable engines in all three. This is a research preview but the diversity of features, architectures, and performance is striking and raises many questions about coding agents’ capabilities and programming languages.

What happens when you ask coding agents to write a chess engine from scratch, with minimal guidance and you replicate the experiment across 12 programming languages: Rust? C++? COBOL?! Rocq!? LaTeX!!?? or even Brainfuck??!! Over the past weeks, I have been running exactly this experiment. The short take-away: coding agents can now generate functional, UCI-compliant chess engines from scratch across a wide range of languages, some reaching over 2000 Elo. To my knowledge, this is the first time coding agents have been shown to produce non-trivial, end-to-end software of this complexity (with no architecture document, no step-by-step guidance) and across languages as diverse as Rust, COBOL, and LaTeX. I couldn’t find prior art for a full playing engine in LaTeX, Brainfuck, or Rocq (formerly Coq; renamed with Rocq 9.0), yet coding agents produced playable engines in all three. This is a research preview but the diversity of features, architectures, and performance is striking and raises many questions about coding agents’ capabilities and programming languages.