Mahnoor's Canadian citizenship test is in 4 days.
She's been studying. But studying alone is slow, and the official IRCC question bank has 141 questions across Canadian history, geography, values, and government. There's no good way to drill them without someone to quiz you.
So I built one.
It's not complicated. An agent with the full IRCC question bank, running on a cron, sending a question every hour to her WhatsApp. She answers. It tells her if she's right, gives the explanation if she's wrong, and moves to the next question.
The whole setup took a few hours - the bulk of it being actually finding and structuring the official question bank properly, not the agent itself.
But here's what's different about building something for someone you know versus building for a user persona: you know exactly where the gaps are.
Mahnoor's weak spots aren't random. National symbols trip people up - the national animal is a beaver, not a moose. The fact that most Canadians work in the service industry, not manufacturing or farming. The Prairie provinces. The specific year women got the vote. These aren't obscure trivia - they're the things that sound right when you guess wrong.
The agent knows the traps because I know the traps. I put them in explicitly.
We're both sitting at 78% on the official questions right now. That's passing, but not comfortably. Four days is enough time to move that meaningfully if the questions keep coming.
There's something clarifying about building under a real deadline for someone whose outcome you care about. You don't over-engineer it. You don't add features. You ask: what's the fastest path to the result that matters?
An hourly question on WhatsApp. That's it. No app to download, no platform to log into, no habit to build. It just shows up.
TL;DR
- Built a citizenship quiz agent for Mahnoor's Canadian test in 4 days
- 141 official IRCC questions, sent hourly to WhatsApp
- Building for someone specific means you know the gaps - and you build for those, not the average case
- Sometimes the right solution is the simplest one that actually gets used