I didn't set out to write a Lichess client

AI Wrote the Endpoints. I Wrote the Library.

I didn't set out to write a Lichess client : i was building a complete chess training application, and I needed to integrate a handful of Lichess API features to make it work. The easy path would have been to wire up just those few endpoints for myself and move on. But open source gives me something every single day, and rather than build only for me, I wanted to give a little of it back — a real, complete, reusable library instead of a private helper. litchee is that: the detour that became its own thing.

I built a Rust client that covers every documented operation in the Lichess API. All 184 of them — users, games, tournaments, puzzles, studies, broadcasts, board and bot play, the opening explorer, the tablebase. One person, a few days, evenings mostly.

The endpoints were the easy part.

That sentence would have been a lie three years ago, so let me be honest about why it isn't one now — and about what actually turned out to be hard.