There is a quiet assumption buried in every "AI caddie" that recommends a club: until you tell it otherwise, it assumes you hit each club a typical distance for your handicap. Close, sometimes. Yours, almost never. Real golfers scatter all over their handicap band, and a caddie working off the band estimate is confidently handing the wrong club to anyone whose 7-iron does not match the table.
We hit this wall building ours, and the fix was not a smarter model. It was asking you for one thing the model cannot guess: how far you actually hit each club. Give it your real yardages and the recommendation stops being an estimate for your handicap and starts being a read of your bag. Skip it, and even a good caddie is left estimating from your index instead of reading your game.
What's Happening
We just extended the caddie setup to nudge for the three things that most directly sharpen a club recommendation: your club yardages, your home course, and a quick profile of your strengths and weaknesses. The yardages are the load-bearing one.
Under the hood, your caddie pulls your real stock yardage straight from your bag when it reasons about a shot. If you have entered it, that is the number it uses. If you have not, it does the honest thing: it works from a reasonable baseline or tells you straight that it does not have your numbers yet and asks, instead of inventing a distance and passing it off as yours. That is the honest version of an AI caddie: it tells you when it is working off your data versus working off an average, instead of dressing up a guess as personalized advice.
So we made the gap visible. A setup banner now sits at the top of your My Golf tab, not just inside a live round, so a missing bag is something you can fix from your couch on a Tuesday rather than discovering it standing over a shot. And if you skip setup entirely, a Day 7 nudge follows up once the first-week onboarding card closes. The whole thing takes about a minute, and it is the single most useful minute you can spend on the app.
The Take
A club recommendation is only as good as the distance it assumes you carry. That sounds obvious, and it is exactly the part most golf software waves past.
Here is the failure in one shot. You have 150 yards to a back pin, a touch into the breeze. A caddie working off the default for your handicap sees 150 and hands you a 7-iron, because the estimate says a player at your index carries a 7 about that far. But your stock 7 goes 140. Take the 7 and you come up a full club short, into the front bunker, and the app that "recommended" it never knew it was wrong. The right club for you was a smooth 6, and the only thing standing between you and that answer was a number the caddie did not have.
This is the difference between a caddie and a calculator. A calculator knows the yardage to the pin. A caddie knows the yardage to the pin and how far you fly a 6 versus a 7 on a day with this wind, and picks accordingly. The second one is only possible if it knows your bag. Everything downstream - the club it suggests, the target it gives you, whether it tells you to lay up or go - rides on those distances being yours and not an estimate.
The Proof
We did not add the yardage prompt to pad the onboarding flow. We added it because the recommendation logic literally reads from it. The caddie fetches your real stock yardage from your saved bag and uses it as the anchor for shot reasoning. When that number is missing, it works from a reasonable baseline or simply says it does not have your carry numbers yet, and it is instructed not to fabricate a distance and present it as personal.
That design choice is the whole point. Plenty of apps will happily give you a confident club recommendation with zero idea how far you hit anything, because admitting "I am estimating here" looks worse in a demo than it should. We would rather the caddie know the difference between your data and an estimate, and act on it. The flip side is that the personalization is opt-in by necessity: it cannot read your bag if you never tell it what is in there.
You do not have to enter the whole bag at once, and here is the mechanic that makes a few clubs worth it. For any club you have not entered, the caddie fills in a distance scaled to your handicap and ranks that into the shot. For any club you have entered, it uses your real carry instead. So every club you add swaps one estimate for one true number, moving that many more recommendations off a guess and onto your game. Start with the ones you hit most - driver, a mid-iron, a wedge - and fill in the rest over time.
The Cut
Most golf apps treat setup as a tax you pay before the product starts. We treat your yardages as the product. They are the one input that turns a club recommendation from a handicap-band estimate into a read of your game, and they take about sixty seconds to enter from the My Golf tab.
If your caddie has ever handed you a club that felt a yard or three off, this is almost certainly why. It is working off the estimate for your handicap because that is all you have given it. Tell it what is in your bag, and the next shot it reads is yours.