Hey Jeff, I’m a software developer and I think I see a very quick win for you guys to improve the product and add a feature that I saw request back in March 2025 regarding hints. Instead of having a hint on every move, please add a button to activate the hint for the turn. This is one of the major issues I have with the board. I want to give someone 5-10 hints per game, I do not want to play the AI. Showing the best move all the time risks the person changing where they would put the piece of they are unsure about the move after seeing the square go green.
I even took the time to turn this into a prompt for LLMs that one of your developers can run to resolve this one-shot. See below.
Your task is to investigate and implement a UX improvement related to the hint system.
Current behaviour:
- The board appears to show a hint / best move automatically on every move or every turn.
- This means the player constantly sees the recommended square highlighted, for example by turning green.
- This creates a problem: the user may change their intended move after seeing the hint, which means they are no longer genuinely playing and learning. They are being guided by the AI too aggressively.
Desired behaviour:
- Do not show hints automatically on every move.
- Add a clear button next to the resignation/offer a draw button that allows the user to activate a hint only for the current turn.
- The hint should only appear after the user explicitly requests it.
- Once the turn is completed, the hint should reset and should not remain active for the next turn unless the user presses the hint button again.
Product reasoning:
- The goal is to let someone use hints selectively, for example 5–10 times per game.
- The user does not want the AI to effectively play the game for them.
- Constantly showing the best move removes player agency and makes the game feel like assisted execution rather than learning.
Investigate the codebase and identify:
1. Where the current hint logic is implemented.
2. Where the board square highlighting logic is controlled.
3. Whether hints are currently tied to turn changes, board state updates, AI move generation, or rendering logic.
4. Whether there is already a historical or partial implementation related to hints, possibly from a request around March 2025.
5. The safest minimal change needed to replace always-on hints with user-triggered hints.
Implementation requirements:
- Add state to track whether the hint is active for the current turn.
- Add a visible “Show hint” button or equivalent existing UI pattern.
- When the button is clicked, calculate/display the hint for the current turn.
- When the player makes a move, reset the hint state.
- When the turn changes, reset the hint state.
- Ensure the hint is not shown by default when a new move/turn starts.
- Preserve existing hint calculation logic if it already works.
- Avoid large refactors unless absolutely necessary.
- Keep the solution simple, maintainable, and consistent with the existing architecture.
Acceptance criteria:
- Starting a game does not automatically show the best move.
- Starting a new turn does not automatically show the best move.
- The hint appears only after clicking the hint button.
- The hint only applies to the current turn.
- After the user makes a move, the hint disappears.
- The user can request another hint on a later turn by pressing the button again.
- Existing game logic, AI logic, and move validation remain unchanged.
- Add or update tests if the project has a test setup.
Please inspect the relevant files, explain the root cause of the current always-on hint behaviour, then make the smallest safe code change to implement the requested behaviour.