I love the idea. Skeptical it will succeed but would be glad to be wrong. My most recent experiment cost $8/hr to run and it still needed a lot of handholding to produce anything useful. And anything that could be automated by AI that would earn money has probably already been automated long before LLMs came along.
Totally hear you. $8/hr is steep, and I’ve hit that wall too.
My hypothesis is that we might find weird edge-cases — small arbitrage tasks, emotional labor, creative content, or even hustling donations — where the agent survives not by being efficient, but by being novel.
It might not scale. But if one survives for 3 days doing random TikTok reposts or selling AI-generated stock photos, I’d consider that a win.
Also, part of the fun is just watching how it tries. Even if it fails, the failure modes could be insightful (or hilarious).
I'm interested in hearing what your experiment was that cost $8/hr. Do AI-agents generally cost about that much per hour? I haven't experimented with running them yet.
That was the cost of running Claude Code for an agent-building-agents experiment I ran.