I picked up Logical Chess: Move by Move a few months ago. Great book. Except every few pages I'd hit a move like Nxb5+ or O-O-O and completely lose the thread. I'd stop, count files, second-guess myself, then forget what Chernev was actually explaining.

I went looking for a free tool that just drilled notation. Nothing paywalled, nothing that needed an account. Couldn't find one I liked.

So I built it: ChessNotate - a free, offline-capable chess notation trainer with spaced repetition.

And I built the entire thing without writing a single line of code myself.

Here's what that actually looked like.

The workflow: Claude Code + Claude Design + Reddit

I'm more of an infra person, not a developer. I can read and understand the code code and spot when something's off — but I'm not sitting there writing TypeScript by hand.…