Kairos: AI interns for everyone | Hacker News Reader

Kairos: AI interns for everyone

kairos.computer

31 pointsbamitsmanas30 comments

Having an intern is supposed to be about talent development. It's a way to simultaneously recruit, train, vet and build loyalty with future employees.

Using interns just as a source of cheap labour is exploiting interns!

Calling this "AI interns" is like saying "this is sub-par and neglects important aspects of your business".

with this logic anything below founding engineer level is "sub-par and neglects important aspects"

That's fair, is there another framing that might better communicate that people can delegate their tasks to kairos and it would go out and do it for them?

If they possess few of the attributes the word "intern" implies maybe they're just workers?

> this is sub-par and neglects important aspects of your business

But that is exactly the right way to think about it. If you have an army of sub-par workers that aren't going to think deeply about their value to your business, but are really cheap (relative to human labor) - how do you make effective use of them? Thinking about AI agents as being high-competence and able to learn your intent is the wrong model at this point. Though they can be high-competence in very specific narrow niches.

This specifically, and llms in general, remind me how apt it is that robot is the slavic word for slave

The LLM shovelware self promotion spam submissions will continue until morale improves.

There's a reason they call them 'interns' - because the results are going to be subpar.

this is actually something we thought about. we didn't want to call them ai employees because that would be overpromising; not sure if intern is the best way to call it either though :/

need to think more...

I can't remember last time I filled in a form and thought "man, I wish I didn't have to do this". And I live in Japan!

Most forms take 2-5 min and have the useful side effect of updating my mental state with important information about whatever I'm filling in a form for. If you want to replace that, the lowest barrier before it becomes useful is that someone else takes complete ownership of the task related to the form.

We were referring to form filling in the aspect of boring data entry tasks like updating a crm; would something like kairos be helpful to you then?

Business crave both data for analysis and checkboxes getting checked for compliance sake. If those don't align to the value of the work - then you have the classic of employees hating the "TPS Reports" they are forced to make. As an example, sales people are notorious for basically never updating CRMs and also they have incentives to skew the specifics anyway.

I get the appeal, but it seems too early for one AI tool to be able to do "everything". I'm guessing there's some company out there trying to automate each of these tasks and dealing with the attendant complexity that comes with it - it's not clear to me that a single "do everything" AI would be able to do this pre-AGI

this makes sense and is generally what we're trying to gauge; we might considering niche'ing down into something

Not much of a time saver:

> "Is it safe to let an AI into my apps? You approve every connection. You can watch it work in real-time. Nothing sensitive happens without your say. Your data stays yours - we don't train on it."

I worked with (human!) interns and most of them did not require being watched in real-time.

to be fair, the AI-intern may be cheaper than a human intern. And since it is AI, I understand the impulse to require human approval. There's nobody to hold accountable with an AI-intern, so letting it have free reign is scary (to me at least)

In case it's not known, "kairos" is ancient Greek for "the exact or critical time", cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos

The scroll-jacking on their landing page got an immediate bounce from me. Why do web designers do this annoying shit that breaks the web? Built by an intern, I suppose...

I am a birder who checks eBird for sightings of rare birds in my area. Let's see if Kairos can do some googling and summarization for me by text message. All it needs to do is find its way to this page:

https://ebird.org/alert/summary?sid=SN36086

This is the first google result for "rare birds pg county" and many similar queries.

I prompted Kairos by text message: "What rare birds have been reported on eBird in Maryland's Prince George's County today?"

On the page above, I can see that a Vesper Sparrow was sighted (and confirmed) and a Common Yellowthroat was reported (but remains unconfirmed). I expect the Vesper Sparrow to be reported, as you ca

I'll anthropomorphize for brevity's sake.

Kairos fired up a chrome session. I can watch as it generates notes like:

- "Accessed eBird.org to search for Prince George's County, Maryland sightings", - "Need to navigate to county-specific recent observations for today's date", - "Will identify rare, unusual, or out-of-season species reported today"

This plan doesn't seem super promising, as there will be hundreds or thousands of bird reports in the county, and the rarities may or may not be on the most recent list. It seems to run into difficulty and generates a new prompt:

"Go to eBird.org and access the recent sightings for Prince George's County, Maryland for January 28, 2026.\n\nTry this approach:\n1. Navigate to https://ebird.org/explore\n2. Use the search or navigation to find \"Prince George's County, Maryland\" or \"Prince George's, US-MD-033\"\n3. Look for a \"Recent Visits\" or \"Recent Observations\" section\n4. Make sure the date filter is set to today (January 28, 2026)\n5. Extract ALL species reported today with their locations\n\nReturn the complete list of species observed today in Prince George's County with:\n- Species name\n- Location/hotspot name\n- Number of individuals (if available)\n- Observer name (if available)\n\nI need the full list to identify which ones are rare or unusual.""

Despite the training data almost certainly including discussions of the eBird rare bird alert feature, which is very popular, it seems to be reinventing the wheel.

Eight minutes in and it is now searching for today's lists from one specific birding hotspots in the county.

It's final text back to me had no rare birds reported today. It correctly reports that a LeConte's Sparrow was seen in Maryland, but it doesn't specify where. Ten seconds of googling shows it was reported on the other side of the state. More than a week ago.

It doesn't mention the Vesper Sparrow or Common Yellowthroat.

thank you for sharing this. we're still improving the way we architect this. any suggestions for improvement off the top of how it went about executing your task?

Is scrolling broken or somehow messed with on that page?

shouldn't be. can you try again or share more about what's breaking?

Safer than clawdbot/moltbot, I'll bet.

What makes you think it isn’t clawdbot under the hood?

it's not :)

Why? It seems just as likely to follow prompt injection commands.

Not to be confused with Kairos, a kubernetes linux distribution. https://kairos.io/

Just another AI product landing page.

Does stuff for you.

$37 per month.

I do not wanna share my phone number to demo a product :(

Why would I want an intern? I want 100x Super-Employee. Scratch that... 1x10^6 x

Scratch that... 1x10^1000000000000.........

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