ChessUp

Inspiration

A colleague mentioned, that he had never learned to play chess. Every app he tried gave him the same puzzles as everyone else and told him a move was bad without explaining why. I believe that WebMCP will be beneficial in learning for anything, not only chess.

What it does

You play a builtin bot. The app records every move and scores it with in-browser Stockfish. Ask your browser agent for help and it reads the position and your mistakes, marks the key error on the board, and builds a drill starting from your own position. ChessUp gathers data for AI, that can be helpful in your journey. The key here is to know, when you did a mistake that you can chat with AI about. Thats why i added Stockfish to the project.

How we built it

Next.js, chess.js, react-chessboard, Stockfish 18 in a Web Worker, and 20 WebMCP tools sharing one store with the UI. Tools are registered in groups with abort signals, so the set shrinks to what is relevant.

Challenges we ran into

WebMCP is pull-based, the app cannot wake the agent. So i needed to inverted the design. The chess bot plays instantly, the page records events, the agent catches up when spoken to. And agent-written puzzles can be wrong, so every solution is checked for legality and verified by Stockfish before the learner sees it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That i learned more about WebMCP and how can i use it with our clients at your company.

What we learned

Good tools expose meaningful actions and return enough state to verify the result.

What's next for ChessUp

I want to add a free registration for the tool so you can store your progress, save more data. The tool could be really good for learning chess.

Built With

• codex
• nextjs