Kyros

Inspiration

USC's rules live on dozens of pages and change without anyone being told. In 2026, Student Government's funding page rewrote one sentence: travel funding went from eight academic weeks before the event to nine weeks before the first payment. A club planning a March 20 trip by the old sentence would have applied a week late. Nobody got a message. We wanted that message to exist.

What it does

Kyros is one text thread for everything USC.

Rules with receipts. Every answer carries the official sentence it came from, with the document and date.
It texts first. When a watched page changes, Kyros re-checks every saved plan and texts the people it touches: old sentence, new sentence, new date.
It looks things up. It reads the page and answers from it, with the address. Official usc.edu pages come first.
It acts only with your yes. It can sign in with a saved login it never sees, and asks before any click that changes something.

The site opens on a real change, replayed from the Internet Archive's March and October 2026 copies of the funding page.

How we built it

TypeScript on Node. A rule engine with no model in it, a page watcher, a message loop with tools, saved logins in the macOS Keychain, iMessage and a web page as the two faces. 641 automated tests. The model talks and looks things up; code computes every date and decides whether a rule really changed.

Challenges we ran into

Making a model's reading of a rule safe to act on. A page that says "submit now" cannot make anything happen: page text is treated as data, and every action is judged by code. On the real October sentence both model readers declined, so the demo reads rule changes with a built-in reader that has no model in it. Sign-in is tested against a stand-in page, not yet USC's own.

What we learned

A model that says "I can't tell" is doing its job. What people must trust (dates, permissions, what counts as a change) belongs in tested code, not in a prompt.