Intern projects that outlived the internship

Summary: A Trail of Bits business operations intern built two Claude-based automation tools during a summer internship: a podcast workflow that monitors upwards of 50 weekly podcasts (about 2,500 episodes a year) and saves an estimated 1,250 hours of listening annually, and a Slack Exporter that lets employees search company knowledge in a single query. The intern replaced a terminal-only Slack exporter with an Electron app anyone can use and used Claude's MCP to expose the Slack workspace to Claude, after working around Claude's tendency to invent employees by feeding it an Excel file mapping staff to keyword specialties.
Bottom line: The intern's own account notes Claude fabricated employees when assigning podcast guests and failed to source host contact info, so the tool only worked once a human-supplied mapping file and an external API were bolted on - the same failure mode any team wiring an LLM into a workflow will hit.

Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗