A pair of Meta glasses calls into WhatsApp, and Stockfish calls out moves in your ear: this open-source cheating workflow is broken down into 8 steps

A pair of Meta Ray-Bans 3, a script running on a Mac, and a WhatsApp video call are enough to send real-time chess moves into your ear. Movez reposted this workflow on X, and the author open-sourced it.

The video shows a park chess table, a glowing board, and an on-screen prompt reading “FINAL MOVE CHECKMATE ROOK f3 → f1,” captioned “Cheating in public lobbies pt.2.”

According to Movez’s breakdown, the process has 8 steps:

1. Run one command on a Mac: npx chesshacker setup. The script downloads Stockfish from GitHub and verifies the checksum.
2. Put on Meta Ray-Bans 3 and start a WhatsApp video call to your own Mac. The glasses see the board, and the Mac sees what the glasses see.
3. The Mac captures frames directly from the call window. While waiting for the opponent to move, it captures about 1 frame per second; when it’s your turn, 1 frame every 3 seconds.
4. Jev runs a cheap pre-check on each frame: whether the board is readable, whether a hand is blocking it, and whether the pieces have moved. If nothing changed, the expensive AI is not called.
5. Only after the pre-check passes does Opus 5.5 read the board. The app compares it against known positions and accepts only legal moves.
6. Stockfish thinks for 0.5 seconds, picks the best response, and gives an evaluation such as +1.5 or mate in 3.
7. macOS speaks the move into the WhatsApp call through a virtual microphone, for example, Rook a to d1. You hear it through your headphones.
8. A command center on the Mac displays in real time whose turn it is, the suggested move, a confidence bar, the move history, and logs.

There are several engineering details underneath. If Opus loses track of the board, the glasses say “Lost track of the board,” and you can undo or manually enter a move. If Stockfish crashes, it restarts once and says “Something went wrong. Still trying.” Each game is saved as a PGN file, and API keys are stored in the macOS Keychain. There is also an overlay that draws the suggested move as an arrow on top of the live video, making it easy to stream with OBS.

Movez included a link to clone the workflow and pointed to a guide on reverse-engineering anything with Opus 5.5.

The comments are not unanimous. Some users say this is crazy, while others can’t believe the whole workflow was open-sourced. Some ask directly whether it is cheating. Opponents say people should stop sharing this. Ginger Goblin’s comment is more specific: technically it’s an impressive hack, but don’t use it in rated games; engine assistance will get you banned, though it’s cool as a training tool.

Others suggest the same workflow could be used for Scrabble, Monopoly, or Blackjack. Deluca wants a Connect Four version:

The Kaspian Sea says they want to see two people wearing these glasses play each other. That idea is more interesting than the cheating itself: what does chess become when both sides have a real-time engine?

3000+ Elo and the sunglasses are not the point. What makes it run is the layering: Jev first filters out static frames, Opus reads only the changed board, Stockfish searches for only half a second, and finally system speech sends it back. The expensive model is placed after the cheap pre-check, which is how latency and cost are kept under control.

As for whether it counts as cheating, the answer is not complicated. When it comes to using engine assistance in rated games, the rules are very clear. As a training tool or a sample of reverse engineering, it does show a reproducible path.

Reference links:

Movez original post: https://x.com/0xMovez/status/2114776375412363288

Workflow article: https://x.com/i/article/2109583646684315648