The latest articles on DEV Community by Victoria (@brightgir). https://dev.to/brightgir https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3798454%2F18d77bb8-0466-44ed-945b-b5f30bb6f006.jpeg https://dev.to/brightgir en Victoria Wed, 06 May 2026 21:18:00 +0000 https://dev.to/brightgir/why-i-built-my-own-dota-2-ai-coach-instead-of-using-existing-ones-51c8 https://dev.to/brightgir/why-i-built-my-own-dota-2-ai-coach-instead-of-using-existing-ones-51c8 <p>I wanted to get better at Dota 2. Not by watching guides — by actually playing. I tried Keenplay but it felt too rigid: no overlay, no model choice, no way to customize it to my playstyle. I'm a developer. So I just built my own.</p> <h2> What it does </h2> <p>It reads your live game state via Dota 2's GSI (Game State Integration) — the game literally sends JSON with your hero, items, and map state to a local server every few seconds. My app catches that, runs it through a RAG pipeline, and shows tactical advice in an overlay while you play.</p> <p>You can also type questions mid-game: press F10, ask "should I fight now?", get an answer without alt-tabbing.</p> <h2> The part that actually took time </h2> <p>The hardest thing wasn't the overlay or the GSI integration. It was prompts for generating knowledge base chunks. Getting the LLM to produce actually useful, structured Dota knowledge — not generic garbage — took way more iteration than I expected.</p> <p>Also: DeepSeek wins on price/quality for this kind of task. Claude and Gemini are great but expensive. Most cheaper models just output nonsense. DeepSeek hits the sweet spot.</p> <h2> Does it actually work? </h2> <p>Yeah. That's the part I'm most proud of — it gives real, relevant advice. Not hallucinated builds. Not generic tips. Actual context-aware suggestions based on what's happening in your game right now.</p> <p>Full RAG pipeline, BERT embeddings, vector search — all in Go, all open source.</p> <p>👉 <a href="https://github.com/BrightGir/dota-ai-coach" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://github.com/BrightGir/dota-ai-coach</a></p> ai opensource gamedev go