[P] Vibecoded on a home PC: building a ~2700 Elo browser-playable neural chess engine with a Karpathy-inspired AI-assisted research loop

I built Autochess NN, a browser-playable neural chess engine that started as a personal experiment in understanding AlphaZero-style systems by actually building one end to end. This project was unapologetically vibecoded - but not in the “thin wrapper around an API” sense. I used AI heavily as a research/coding assistant in a Karpathy-inspired autoresearch workflow: read papers, inspect ideas, prototype, ablate, optimize, repeat. The interesting part for me was seeing how far that loop could go on home hardware (just ordinary gaming RTX 4090.