Home / about / news / blog / 72

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus

Header image

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

My copilots invented their own sorting methods that didn't sort. Inputted non-existent function names. Windsurf cheerfully discarded the contents of multiple functions and replaced them with 'your code here' because the context became too complex. It's like an over-enthusiastic junior who sometimes has brilliant insights, but also regularly blindly copy-pastes code that turns out to be complete nonsense. Windsurf even managed to write Python code in a JavaScript file. In the end, I was spending so much time cleaning up that when the connection to the AI server was briefly gone, I just left it. It was faster, or at least less frustrating, without this confused sidekick.

The Kaspirov consists of a webcam mounted in a lampshade above a physical chess board, and two buttons, all connected to a small computer. As players make moves on the board, they press the buttons as they would on a traditional chess clock. This instructs the computer to take a before and after picture of the chessboard using the overhead webcam. By comparing those images the computer can determine which move has been made, feed this into the Stockfish chess engine, which calculates the best response. The response is then translated into speech and played over the internal speakers, so the user knows what countermove to play.

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

[HONDENKOTS]

Learn More

Visit our documentation or contact us for more information.