Three Months of Code: What a Patent Lawyer Built from Zero

I built a multi-engine shogi AI, deployed it to rated games on Floodgate, and watched it lose to programs it should have crushed. I'm a patent lawyer. I'd been writing code for less than two months when that happened. Three months ago, in December 2025, I wrote my first line of code. This is the record of what I built, what broke, and what I learned by deleting most of it. The Failure That Taught Me Everything I designed a multi-engine consultation architecture — the kind of thing that sounds impressive on paper. Multiple engines voting on the best move, weighted evaluation, the works. I deployed it to rated games, and it got weaker. The obvious reaction would have been to tune parameters. Instead, I traced the actual cause. Engine R2 was running with multipv=3, generating its top three candidate moves. Those alternative moves were bleeding into the primary engine's evaluation as noise. The consultation wasn't adding signal — it was adding confusion. The correct answer was deletion. Re