It was mid-October, peak leaf-peeping season in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Chad Markey was on a rare break between clinical rotations during his last year of medical school. He should have been gossiping with his Dartmouth classmates about life after graduation. In a few months, they’d all be going their separate ways to start residency training at hospitals around the country. Instead, Markey was alone in his apartment, deep down a rabbit hole, preparing to go to war. He’d wake each morning, open his laptop, and start coding. Some days, he wouldn’t notice the sun had gone down until one of his roommates came home and asked why the lights weren’t on. For days, Markey had been scrolling through a Discord group about medical residency, a font of crowdsourced knowledge where students report back to their peers on every stage of the application and selection process. He’d watched as other students, lots of them, posted about the interview invitations they’d received. Markey didn’t have any interview offers, only outright rejections. That seemed not just odd but wrong to the quiet-mannered 33-year-old from Houston, Texas, who speaks confidently about his accomplishments. Markey combed through his application looking for a fatal flaw. He didn’t find anything he thought would prompt a residency program director to toss an otherwise competitive application, so his suspicion turned to another culprit. He’d heard rumblings that some hospitals were using a free AI screening tool to help process applications—and that it had been displaying incorrect grades for some students. He began to wonder whether AI was responsible for his lack of interview offers. Even recruiters will admit it’s fair to wonder. HR departments complain of a wave of AI-generated job applications, prompting the need for more AI filters. So Markey went to work on an impossible task. He would spend the next six months writing emails, research papers, legal requests, and a constant stream of Python code, trying to peer inside the AI screener