Whenever I see another Stockfish update I dream of the day that I sit down and code my own chess bot that is good enough to beat me. I would be so happy if I manage to do that.
(If you ever end up going for it, don't use AI it takes away a lot of the fun)
The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch.
From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)
Something as simple as encoding the 64-square board in a 64-bit number leads to a rabbit hole that can last years.
After that point, the "AI" part is already solved and you just need to implement it (alpha-beta + all the heuristics).
Most of the recent chess engines simply implement a neural network (by copying Stockfish) and suddenly are at 3000 elo with no effort! Such a waste.