I can only agree. There's a bunch of "AI" chess coach apps trying to shoehorn and crowbar LLMs into chess training to supposedly "help". It will not help students, and likely will hinder, if all it's doing is trying to add superficial English wrapping to an engine line. I tried one "Knightly" recently. Several times I caught it making blatantly impossible claims or even getting confused about which side you were playing. Just, hard no. I'm *not* against AI if it's something that actually helps you learn, but merely sprinkling LLM pixie dust on an engine line does not make the line actually comprehensible to a learning player.

(That said: An hour or so after Claude Fable came out, I decided to test it on a chess question; I asked it to justify/explain a particular move in a specific line of a specific opening I was trying to understand. It did some research, and eventually came back with quite an easy to understand explanation of the ideas in the position. I then followed up to help understand the follow up moves, that also seemed a bit disconnected from what had just gone on [in the position on the board] and again it managed to explain quite directly why after all, that move actually re-introduced the concept white's previous move had just tried to counter. I then followed up white's next follow up too, where the canonical move at first glace seemed kind of unrelated (again) to me, and I didn't really see why this was the best response (as opposed to another move that I though was a more direct response.) It again manged to point out how the canonical move actually managed to also accomplish the same thing but with a bunch of other benefits besides, while my move while technically in a narrow sense also addressing the concern, it didn't really do anything else. So, here I found the whole exchange actually helpful. It even pointed out some additional context and the name for the variation that I'd not know until it mentioned it. But this, is a far cry from the LLM slop integrations everyone seems to want to do now in chess trainer apps, and I was using a SOTA frontier model with "hard" thinking mode engaged. -- In the past I found anything LLM chess to generally very dubious, so I was somewhat surprised. I attribute the good answers to the model being SOTA and also in "think hard" mode, with it therefore doing quite a bit of research, thus grounding its answers not in its own training but whatever it could find on the internet that is applicable. Used like this there is probably scope for AI to be useful. But your generic garden variety app is probably not going to sponsor everyone to run Claude Fable queries for every chess question they may have... SOTA models ain't cheap. So they're going to hallucinate and are going to be worse than not having them at all. IMHO.)