How the clerk works

1. It's for chess

The clerk is there for everything chess: your games, openings, endgames, puzzles, plans and how you think at the board. Ask it about something else and it answers in a line or two, friendly, then brings you back to chess. It is a study partner for your chess, not a companion.

2. It checks itself

The clerk is an AI model, so it can be wrong. Its chess claims are checked against our own Stockfish, and endgames of 7 pieces or fewer against the Lichess tablebase, where they can be. Nothing it suggests happens on the board until you press its button.

3. Keeping it clean

Swear words always show as X on the screen, for everyone. The clerk never reads them: they are taken out of your message before it goes, and the clerk answers the rest. A message with nothing useful left in it is removed after you send it, with no reply and nothing sent to the clerk.

4. What it reads

Each time you send a message, the clerk reads the posts of this session and the ones you pinned (📌), the position on the board, your own rules for it, and its notes about you. ✕ on a post takes it out of view and out of what the clerk reads. + New Session starts fresh: the clerk stops reading the posts above, except the pinned ones.

5. What it remembers

The clerk keeps short notes so you never have to explain twice: lines you ask it to keep ("I play the Caro-Kann"), the topics you're working on and where each one stands, and how you work and what you miss. It uses them quietly to aim at what you need, and it never brings up your old conversations. Your notes are kept on your computer, under your account. You can read every one in Help > Memory and take out any line, any topic, or all of it.

6. Nothing is shared

No conversation is ever shown to anyone else: not to other players, not to coaches, not to another account on the same computer. When the clerk works on a general subject, such as the Sicilian Defense, it may use a short lesson base that is the same for everyone; that base is written from the subject's name alone, never from what anyone said.

7. Which AI answers

You choose the model, or leave it on Auto, which sends teaching to the strongest model, a quick look-up to the fastest, and the rest in between. Each answer says which model wrote it. Answers use AI credit; the stronger the model, the more each costs.

8. The human-like engine

Besides Stockfish, ChessClerk has a human-like engine, trained on real games to play the moves people of a given strength actually play. It can play you, and it lets the clerk say how often a player of your strength finds a move ("A 1500 finds e4 here about 6 times in 10"). Its name and license are on the licenses page.

More about what leaves your computer is in the privacy notice.

ChessClerk · Terms · Privacy · Licenses