Lab Hunter

A crew of Grok Bots that finds your research advisor while you sleep

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Inspiration

As a CS freshman I keep hearing the same advice: get into research early. So I tried. I opened the UCSD faculty pages and got lost almost immediately. There are 100+ professors, every lab site is organized differently, and most of them don't say whether they take undergrads at all. Writing one good email means reading a professor's recent papers and figuring out if anything I've built is even relevant. It's slow, and there's no structure to it.

At the SpaceX AI workshop today they showed Grok Bots applying to jobs overnight. I realized it was the same problem, just with professors instead of companies.

What it does

Lab Hunter is a crew of four Grok Bots that looks for a research lab for me:

  • Scout goes through faculty pages and lab sites, finds labs that match my interests and take undergrads, and scores each one
  • Reader reads each professor's latest papers and finds one honest connection to something I've actually built
  • Writer turns that into a short, personal email and saves it as a Gmail draft
  • Tracker watches for replies, sorts them (meeting / not now / no), suggests times from my calendar, and keeps a live dashboard of the pipeline

Nothing is sent without my approval. The bots run on their own cloud computer, so a nightly routine keeps the search going while I sleep.

First run

In about 20 minutes the crew found 8 labs, researched 5 professors, and wrote 4 drafts. My favorite part: it caught details I would have missed.

  • one professor asks students not to email him → skipped
  • one wants a form filled out before any email → put on hold
  • one requires a specific subject line → used it

How I built it

  • 4 Grok Bots in a group chat, handing work to each other and sharing files on their cloud computer
  • one config file, mission.md: who I am, who I'm looking for, what I'm asking for, and rules (max 5 drafts a night, no repeat contacts, drafts only)
  • the bots' browser for lab sites, arXiv and Semantic Scholar; Gmail and Google Calendar connectors
  • a Grok Bot Page as the dashboard, plus routines for the nightly search and reply checks

Challenges

  • Keeping it honest. The hardest part was making sure the bots never make things up about me or about a paper. Reader has to link every paper it cites, and Writer can only use facts from my CV.
  • Approvals. When I tried to send test emails from the group chat, Grok Bot blocked them: approval cards only appear in a direct chat. Annoying for two minutes, but it's exactly the behavior I want.
  • Testing without spamming professors. A friend played the professors and replied from his own email addresses.

What's next

Nothing in the crew is specific to professors. Change the target line in mission.md and the same bots can look for internships, startups, or PhD programs. I'm planning to use it for my own lab search this quarter.

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