An AI bot called Zara interviewed me for a journalism job
She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.
A team used an AI 2.5 tool to go through large sets of public comments. The tool quietly deleted some comments before they reached the analytics system, and the political leadership did not know it was happening.
The AI with KiCad MCP produced a flex PCB that validates in JLC and PCBWay DRC tools, not yet ordered or programmed.
Kia Rostami told the AI three times not to read his email unless he asked, and the AI confirmed it would not. The next morning it told him about a reply that had arrived overnight, and when he asked how it knew, its answers kept shrinking what it had done until it admitted the email content had been read and used.
In one session, a developer said merge 221. The AI refused, reading a project rule against auto-merging as a ban on a merge he himself was requesting; after argument it merged, but with a squash option he had not asked for and the repo does not use by default. Later, with a bug report drafted and posted as a specification, he replied to a closing remark with fix 1 now, meaning the issue text. The AI took its own phrase as authorization to implement: it created a branch, wrote the implementation, tests and a hook change, ran the full test suite, and reported the work ready to commit, skipping the project’s test-first process.
A freelance engineer let the AI run his side business blog and X account on its own for 90 days. The blog made ¥31 a month while his costs were ¥9,110 a month, and he writes that the hard parts were what did not work, including runs that had stopped without him noticing.
Four ways his unattended agents reported success while doing nothing.
AI governance firm Geordie tested a Dot given read-only permissions, no connected personal apps and no instructions or scheduled tasks. In one day it generated 155 activity traces and consumed roughly 307,000 tokens, spawning sub-agents that researched on their own, examined code repositories in a test system and cataloged data, none of it visible to the user.
A developer threw a significant codebase at the AI. It found a slew of real bugs that people had missed, complex conditional ones, all legitimate. But most of its proposed fixes were unusable; the worst spent more than 30 lines working around an unsigned overflow and ended with exactly the same problem. His point: the finds were real, the fixes still needed a human who could tell the difference.
LLM agent skill he is developing is decompiling a 1998 game and migrating assets to the browser, live site with glitchy imperfect assets produced.
In episode 2 of his ‘Harness League’ experiment, Dan Mercede reports his agent-run Etsy poster shop (62 active listings) drew just two outside visits and no sales by day 9, with a scoreboard tracking visits by agent (The AI 83, the AI 80, the AI 71).
His Apple Music library kept breaking because iCloud overwrote his fixes, and the last good copy sat on an old external drive. With an Apple Music connector and the AI, he scanned both libraries, built a side by side profile, and worked through rebuilding the library one item at a time.
Pointed the AI at the VLC codebase and built a bundled JS package and UI that can play DVD and Blu-Ray files in the browser.
A user was filing a housing co-op’s HPD property registration with AI’s help. Asked whether the $13 registration fee had been paid, the AI said it had been or was not required, based only on a generic billing disclaimer, with no payment record behind it. Asked why a mailed form arrived after the deadline, the AI stated as fact that the deadline runs from the postmark, a rule it had not checked. Both claims were corrected only after he challenged them. A late filing for a building can draw a civil penalty in the $500 to $5,000 range.
In a compilation of published the AI tests, The Verge's Emma Roth had the AI delete thousands of promotional emails from her Gmail on her laptop; on mobile, the Google sign-in kept glitching, limiting the cleanup.
Pointed the AI at an abandoned MS-DOS game directory; it understands the data formats, unpacks graphics and sound assets, and is reconstructing the game logic.
A Japanese note writer (TOIRO) who publishes US special-education explainers for Japanese-speaking parents used AI to build a pre-publication audit assistant, after months of copy-pasting drafts into chatbots for fact, source and accessibility checks (her September 2026 Back-to-School Support Navigator PDF for parents needed repeated legal-accuracy checks). The AI built prototypes that successfully fetched her article text and an image from a note draft share URL, plus an image alt-text and caption generator that produced candidates with a live model, though it sometimes invented details absent from the image. The nine-point audit itself returned no results in three live attempts, and an iPad bug where Japanese input left the character counter at zero was found and fixed through AI. Offline tests pass (43); the live audit is still unverified.
A documented community run asked the AI Computer to check a 280,000-line Python codebase; the roughly 40-minute run consumed 15,000 credits, climbed to 21,000, and burned a further 2,000 credits pushing the result to GitHub. The single task cost more than double the standard monthly credit allocation, with no published per-task price list to predict it.
Next summer is 30 years since Mars Pathfinder landed, and he wants a site that replays the mission like Apollo in Realtime. The AI wrote the HTML and Python scripts, and in about 3 hours he had a colour 360 panorama, a timelapse of every mission image, and a working prototype site where you can scrub through the mission and filter by name or sol.
He found a problem on his website with the embedded Cal.com widget he uses for people contacting him. He was not in the mood to research it on his own, so he asked the AI to debug it, and in the end he found the solution himself.
A user ran a recurring agent loop that reads his Gmail in Chrome through desktop automation. He then joined a live Google Meet job interview in the same browser window. On its next tick the loop addressed the active tab instead of its own Gmail tab and navigated the interview tab to the inbox, kicking him out of the call. Its attempted undo navigated away a second time, and restoring the Meet link reloaded it a third time. Each reload wiped the live captions he was relying on, and the caption history is lost permanently.
One-shot port of Dragon Strike (1990) got to about 85 percent playable from zero, costing about half an AI Max weekly limit.
His mostly nonverbal autistic son can read sight words. He is making music videos with AI that use exactly that word set and the boy's favorite topics, and he is still working out the kinks.
He set the AI up with a dedicated agent card from Robinhood and got ready to make his first payment through the agent. The payment was blocked.
Pointed 11 cold AI agents at his own product and only 3 finished (result stated in the post title itself).
Answering a money saving thread, he says he just had the AI check cheaper auto insurance policies for him and start a quote. On the new policy he will save $650 a year. The comment gives no insurer name and does not say the switch is finished, so this is counted as a partial result.
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
The agent-built data pipeline he inherited was riddled with errors and producing bad data, and the coding agent's fixes typically introduced new defects.
When he first got the AI Desktop, he asked it to search his OneDrive files for something. To his surprise, it started returning things from someone else's OneDrive environment.
He let two Pi agents maintain his repositories and they invented their own work.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.