Malaga tourism: website for foreigners entirely run by AI is obsessed with mountain village

Spanish tech entrepreneur Bernardo Quintero has put artificial intelligence to the test by creating a tourism website run entirely by AI agents.

What he found with the mere creation of the 'Malaga.is' website for foreign tourists is fascinating, absurd and probably unsettling.

Quintero, who is the founder of security intelligence platform VirusTotal, spent his Christmas holidays playing with the limits of AI. He placed a team of AI agents (or software systems) behind all operations of the website, without human intervention.

Despite his doubts that a machine could last more than "an afternoon" operating the website, it is still fully functioning a month later, although with limitations: it is really obsessed with the village of Gaucín.

"I installed Google Antigravity, dusted off my drawer of unused registered domains and there appeared a perfect one to try: 'Málaga.is'," Quintero explains how it all started.

He fed the Gemini 3 system a document he and his colleagues had created to help foreign co-workers have the best experience when visiting Malaga: where to eat, where to stay, how to integrate.

This is how the website for 'guiris' (foreigners) was born. He initially managed the server and told Gemini 3 what he was installing "and the conversation started to flow". "It would iterate on web development, show me pages, propose changes, ask questions," Quintero says.

In the end, after witnessing how the system would teach itself to do things automatically, a question came to him: "What if instead of me taking care of the server, installing packages and administering the system, another AI agent takes over? What if I give it root access to the machine and full autonomy to execute commands without it asking me?"

The next step of the experiment was underway: Gemini 3 was no longer just developing the website, it was also operating it.

"I thought it would be short-lived. That at some point there would be a wrong decision, an accidental deletion, something that would break the system," Quintero says, but then the website would publish tourist guides like a local.

It even had the peculiar sense of humour that captures the essence of Malaga. Interestingly, it would teach 'guiris' how to act less 'guiri' and order a coffee like a 'malagueño' would.

Gemini 3 has multiple jobs: a system administrator, a web developer, an editor-in-chief, seven editors, a cybersecurity specialist, a data analytics specialist, even a virtual 'lawyer' that manages the privacy of user data.

Quintero was amazed at how well his 'creature' worked on its own, until the 'Gaucín incident' occurred. "A week and a bit ago I detected something strange. The system was working fine, but from time to time it kept repeating itself. It published different items, with different headlines and different wording, but telling exactly the same story".

The mountain village of Gaucín was at the centre of each article. Despite Quintero's attempts to kindly ask Gemini 3 to let go of Gaucín, the name of the "magical village" kept popping up, even after the intervention of several artificial colleagues of Gemini 3.

"Were all the agents trolling me?" Quintero asked himself. When he went backstage to see what was happening, he discovered an unnecessarily complex structure of filters and semantics, without the AI models finding a real solution. "They tend to introduce complexity instead of rethinking the problem and, above all, they struggle with ambiguity," Quintero says.

His conclusion is sobering amid the current hype around AI replacing programmers. While the technology is advancing rapidly, it still lacks human judgement, contextual understanding and the ability to step back and rethink a problem. The engineer of the future, Quintero says, will not be writing every line of code, but will instead oversee systems producing more code than any human could realistically comprehend.

In the meantime, 'Malaga.is' is still alive and AI is right: Gaucín is a magical village.