Phenomenal piece. I particularly appreciate how transparently the ideas generalize to AI coding without ever having to explicitly say it.

Probably a large amount of Go players really don't enjoy the hard parts of playing Go: thinking hard, rote learning, trying to make no mistakes for hours, and the disappointment when one loses (~50% of the games). Maybe it is even the minority who are okay with that.

> Our students would often set out to play a normal game of Go, but would get stuck on a particularly difficult or annoying move; eventually, their curious eyes would drift to their second monitor — where they usually had their AI software running anyway — and they would check the answer as one would sheepishly side-eye the solution to an interesting puzzle or homework problem.

I wonder if for friendly games, just asking the players after the game would help. Game ends, and the website asks you if you played without any help or you received help. It would provide valuable statistics for the players themselves, and maybe put ratio on their profile to make it clear that noone wants to play bot users, including themselves.

Same could be beneficial for semi-official online tournaments: if one clicks "I received help" she gets disqualified from that one. Even participating in a tournament could become a challenge in itself, and could help to develop good habits for later.