A developer tested six AI interview assistant products, found all failed several behavior checks, and published a public dataset with 66 assessments across 6 products and 11 criteria, available on GitHub and Zenodo.
I build CTRLpotato, so obvious disclosure first, all six products I tested are competitors. CTRLpotato isn't included in the results and I'm not using this to declare a winner. Over June and July I tested Cluely, Interview Coder, LockedIn AI, ULTRACODE, Parakeet AI and Final Round AI on Mac and/or Windows. I originally did this because I kept seeing claims like invisible, undetectable, real-time, etc. and wanted to see what the actual desktop apps did. I ended up with enough screenshots, recordings and notes that keeping everything in six separate reviews became pretty useless, so I normalized it into a dataset. It's now 66 assessments across 6 products and 11 criteria. A few results that surprised me: All 6 failed the focus-behavior check in the setup I tested. All 6 failed the cursor-behavior check. Shortcut isolation failed on all 5 products where I tested it. The sixth wasn't tested. I tested receiver-side screen sharing on 4 products. 2 failed and 2 were mixed. There were also some pretty strange context failures, where an assistant would answer an old coding task or otherwise lose track of what it was supposed to be answering. I don't want to oversell those numbers. This wasn't a lab experiment where every product got an identical setup. Different versions, platforms and test flows were involved, which is why every row includes the app version, platform, date, what actually happened, limitations and evidence where I have it. The five result labels are just passed, mixed, failed, not found and not tested. A failure means it failed in the documented setup, not that the feature can never work. The whole thing is public here: https://www.ctrlpotato.com/compare I also put the actual dataset on GitHub with CSV/JSON/JSONL, schema, codebook and checksums: https://github.com/ae0j/ctrlpotato-ai-interview-assistant-benchmark And there's a versioned Zenodo DOI if anyone wants to cite or archive it: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21915738 The dataset is free to use, including commercially, with attribution. One thing I'm still unsure about: whether the passed/mixed/failed column actually makes the dataset better. The more I worked on this, the more I felt that the raw observation + limitations were more useful than trying to compress what happened into one label. Curious what people who work with evaluation datasets think.
AICompanionBench introduces the first publicly available benchmark dataset of 2,123 real-world AI companion conversations annotated across nine safety risk categories, used to evaluate 20 LLMs as safety judges. Results show strong models handle explicit harmful content well but struggle with nuanced risks like manipulation and false positives on benign conversations.
The author created an open-source rubric tool to evaluate agentic AI vendor documentation on tool-call correctness, loop termination, and multi-step state coherence, scored five vendors (Anthropic, OpenAI, LangGraph, Sierra, Salesforce), and requests feedback on methodology and potential bias toward public documentation depth.
A personal ranking of five AI voice agent platforms (LuMay, Vapi, Retell AI, Pipecat, LiveKit Agents) based on production reliability, latency, voice quality, and scalability after 60+ hours of testing.
A detailed overview of the best AI tools across multiple categories as of 2026, based on the author's testing. Includes assessments of AI assistants, coding IDEs, coding agents, app builders, image and video generation, and audio tools.
The author built a free quiz-based tool to help developers find suitable, well-maintained AI agent repositories among 50+ options, avoiding broken or outdated repos, and is seeking community feedback.