Chess, drawn like doodles on paper

Chess interfaces are a solved UI and an unsolved drawing problem. Kevin Ngo's version, made with Claude Sonnet 5.5, looks like doodles on paper. The pieces have to stay pieces. A knight that becomes a scribble is no longer a knight, and the game quietly ends.

Paper is the material constraint. Ink weight, the slight wrongness of a freehand line, a board that is not a UV grid. Digital "sketch" styles usually harden into a font of wiggly vectors. This one has to survive pieces moving, which is when fake paper reveals itself.

The model is Sonnet, not the largest Opus in the room, and the result is a look rather than a system. That is a useful reminder: taste in a smaller model can be the whole project.