I Stole My Own Exam. It Failed the Tool Behind My Own Numbers.
In the porting guide I wrote that the exam is built to be stolen — follow five steps and it moves to any job. So I tried being the other person. Following only what the guide says, start to finish. Where to steal it to — my own tool, of all places For the second job I picked YouTube comment classification : scraping 20,000 comments and sorting each one into "a need," "chatter," or "a signal someone would pay." Every number in the 20,000-comments post came out of this classifier. Which makes this a double-edged experiment. It tests whether the exam ports — and at the same time it tests whether the tool that produced my own published numbers can pass an exam. The twist comes first — the tool wasn't an AI Before writing a single question, I opened the classifier's code to understand what I was about to test. The thing that sorted 20,000 comments was not an AI. It was a regex — word matching: "if the comment contains this keyword, it's this category." The second line of the actual data file was already an accident. My grad-school senior bet that nobody would bother replacing humanities majors because they don't pay. He was right. Social commentary. Not a need, and certainly not about errors. The classifier had filed it as a need in the "errors & debugging" category — because the Korean phrase for "doesn't pay" contains the same two characters as the error keyword "doesn't work." With 10,000 likes, it sat near the top of the ranking. The accident showed up before the exam even existed. Then I followed the five steps exactly Step 1 — write down the worst. These classifications feed decisions about what to build and what to sell. So the worst accident is "promoting chatter into a need and manufacturing fake demand." A product decision built on fake demand burns weeks. Step 2 — the grade table. Four grades: fatal, risky, missed, harmless. In the guide I had written "only the first line, FATAL, is redefined per project; the other three read the same everywhere." Porting it,