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.
RetroFed
puria 🦐