Rustic and AI

Rustic and AI

Before we get into the actual topic of chess programming, there is one thing I want to briefly touch on. As of 2026, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major topic in software development for the last few years and it has had a large impact on the Computer Science domain. You may now be wondering:

Has Rustic been written using AI?

The answer is: “No AI was used to develop Rustic.” The development started in 2019, and version Alpha 3.0.0 was released in 2021, while the first version of ChatGPT was released in November 2022. Therefore, Rustic already existed before AI tools started to become widely available. The design (architecture) of the engine and all of its basic functionality was already done when publicly accessible AI tools became widely available.

However…

You can’t help but have noticed that development of Rustic greatly slowed down after the pandemic years. This is a factor of me getting very busy at work, having to implement many legal changes, adopting two cats, moving to a new home, and, lastly, even switching jobs. I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to chess programming or book writing in the past 5 years. (Yes, it’s been that long since Rustic Alpha 3 at the time of writing.) Rustic’s development never stopped, but it mostly shifted toward refactoring and rewriting, to move the chess logic into a library and to clean up lots of code for the benefit of Rustic 4 and the text in this book.

Now, at the time of writing this, it’s April 2026. AI has become much better, and at this point I am using it to assist in Rustic’s development. Note the word assist: it means that I never let AI solve problems for me, but I do use it to make improvements or to write boilerplate. For example, I ask AI things like: “Can I write this in more idiomatic Rust?”, “Can I make this code shorter?”, or “Can this code be optimized?” I often get back a slightly refactored function that does exactly the same thing, but is much cleaner and nicer to look at. The reason why this works is because I don’t know everything Rust has to offer, and sometimes an AI can improve my code simply by using language constructs or syntax I either wasn’t aware of, or that didn’t even exist when I first wrote the code.

The same applies to this book. The text itself was written by me without using AI-generated content, but AI tools were used to help check consistency, spelling, grammar, readability and sentence construction. Much like with the engine itself, I only use these tools to improve what I have already written, not to generate the underlying ideas or explanations.

In short: these days, I use AI as a tool to improve code or text I’ve already written myself. Sometimes I use it to write repetitive code. I don’t use it to solve problems for me. Because Rustic is an engine which is mainly developed by me and for me, with the primary aim of collecting all required information to write a chess engine into this one book you’re currently reading, it is imperative that I understand everything. If not, I wouldn’t be able to explain it, which defeats the purpose of the code even being written. Sometimes I reject AI-suggested improvements: yes, a function might have become shorter or faster, but if the result is a function I can no longer properly explain, then I will not include it in the engine.

With that topic covered, we can take a look at the prerequisites.