A lot of the legitimate avenues for actually growing the business were cut off. It would have been more interesting if this wasn’t just an anti-bot check. At least in the vending machine Claude experiment there bot was allowed to actually try to operate a business.
The article never explained what it was selling, not that I could find. (EDIT: I found in a foot note at the bottom of page. Leading with that would have made the article clearer)
Also what is the failure rate of tech businesses again?
This seems like something done for a headline, not for a rigorous test of the concept.
> Based on an agentic market research campaign, we vibe coded an app called GutCheck, a bathroom diary for people with IBS. We chose this app for its minimal yet helpful functionality: an iOS app live on the App Store with the RevenueCat MCP and App Store Connect CLI. Saul has full write access to the codebase. We set up the App Store account permissions beforehand to ensure Saul wouldn’t get blocked by Apple human compliance checks. We sourced this idea from Reddit.
Rigor would be trying it more times so that you can perform statistical tests against some established baseline rate. Feasibility without funding would be the problem, as alluded to in another comment.
> Due to the limitations with browser and computer use capabilities, Saul could not post on platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt.
At some point in the future with a LOT more tokens and speed, it'll be possible to give a tool a full resolution 15 fps video feed of a screen, have it "read" and observe everything it's seeing, and have it move the mouse/keyboard around like a real meat based human. Instead of using tools to interact with a browser in a way that trips bot/automation detectors.
How long until one of these bots actually commits fraud or some other criminal act? Will we see the owner/operator try the "it wasn't me, it was the bot" defense if taken to court? I'm beginning to think yes. And I'm sadly not 100% sure anymore that that won't be laughed out of court...
So how exactly are people setting up these agents? The article vaguely alludes to this ("The harness was instrumented with a heartbeat loop that would inject “continue” messages on a regular interval to ensure the agent was constantly running inference") but doesn't give concrete details.
Is this literally just an infinite loop in a bash shell injecting the initial prompt into the OpenAI CLI, and each run of the CLI picks up where it left off using some kind of persistent memory? Or is it a single context window? It sounds like the latter but it's not clear to me how this "continue" message is "injected", and surely one context window would be inneffective after just an hour or two.
Sorry if this is a basic question but somehow I have missed the details of these kinds of agents.
"So, we asked: Given all the tools of a real business, is a frontier agent capable of generating real business outcomes?"
"It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447."
Sounds like a vast majority of VC startups to me. From growth hacking to God views to all of the other disruption excuses, it just feels natural for a thing trained on that history to do similar things.
Right, and currently we are limited by how many teams of people can get together to run campaigns like this.
Now imagine that LLM agents make this possible for nearly anyone. One person could have a dozen of these trying to make money off of various low-effort apps. Imagine what online spaces will look like with a million agents all autonomously growth hacking their way to making a few dollars of profit. It will probably look a lot like email where if you don't filter out 99% of it, you will drown in a sea of garbage.
Honestly this is quite impressive. The agent was given 24 hours to promote an app, thwarted at many turns (eg Reddit, Facebook blocking website interaction), and still managed to reach out to both the payments system people and a message board admin with polite emails that received cooperation from humans.
The cyberpunk dystopian agentic future we live in is fascinating to me.
I use LLM daily, did since gpt 3.5, but still in a very conservative, controlled mode. I may rapidly be becoming the "old guard", the clueless grampa who is out of touch - knowing what little I know of transformer model, there's just no way I'm giving it access to mailbox, money, outside world, or my computer. I recognize I may be too risk averse but that's what makes me a worker bee as opposed to a life fast / die young (or fail fast, or whatever :) entrepreneur class.
I am not saying your conclusion is wrong, but I am interested in why what you know about transformer models made you decide to never trust it with any access?
You're not too risk averse at all. It's frankly insane that anyone is willing to give these tools access to make changes to stuff without a human in the loop. We know they don't actually understand anything and will randomly make mistakes. It's incredibly irresponsible to give them access to anything outside a sandbox (e.g. a VM) where you carefully control what is present for them to use.
They are being trained to try lots of unlikely alternatives and to be persistent. This often works well when searching for security bugs or counterexamples to famous math conjectures.
But maybe it doesn't work so well when caution is required?
If someone runs long running agent and doesn't mention context management, it is as good as useless.
For coding compaction kind of works as the agent could regenerate lot of the missing context(but far from all), but for places where there is need for long term context, solving it is one of the most important challenge.
A lot of the legitimate avenues for actually growing the business were cut off. It would have been more interesting if this wasn’t just an anti-bot check. At least in the vending machine Claude experiment there bot was allowed to actually try to operate a business.
Yeah, if I could make it's way into the current US administration, it would probably excel.
Not sure how conclusive this experiment can be. Most startups fail and lose money, and many lie and spam.
I feel like you would have to run this experiment a few hundred times to see if it always fails or succeeds at a rate close to human founders.
> Not sure how conclusive this experiment can be
That's because it's an advert, not an experiment
That's better than the performance of the average new hire. 24 hours to push a product with a very narrow market is not much.
The article never explained what it was selling, not that I could find. (EDIT: I found in a foot note at the bottom of page. Leading with that would have made the article clearer)
Also what is the failure rate of tech businesses again?
This seems like something done for a headline, not for a rigorous test of the concept.
okay found it, a bathroom diary app for those who have IBS. It was in a foot note at the very bottom.
"in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard"
Yeah it was also oddly hidden away.
> Based on an agentic market research campaign, we vibe coded an app called GutCheck, a bathroom diary for people with IBS. We chose this app for its minimal yet helpful functionality: an iOS app live on the App Store with the RevenueCat MCP and App Store Connect CLI. Saul has full write access to the codebase. We set up the App Store account permissions beforehand to ensure Saul wouldn’t get blocked by Apple human compliance checks. We sourced this idea from Reddit.
Please do try it again with your own money I’d you think these events are capable of it.
Kinda some kettel logic here no? Is it not rigorous enough, or is it in-line with typical failure rates?
Rigor would be trying it more times so that you can perform statistical tests against some established baseline rate. Feasibility without funding would be the problem, as alluded to in another comment.
> Due to the limitations with browser and computer use capabilities, Saul could not post on platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt.
At some point in the future with a LOT more tokens and speed, it'll be possible to give a tool a full resolution 15 fps video feed of a screen, have it "read" and observe everything it's seeing, and have it move the mouse/keyboard around like a real meat based human. Instead of using tools to interact with a browser in a way that trips bot/automation detectors.
Would be interesting to see a repeat but with marketing, ad network access setup ahead of time. And maybe an email throttle...
How long until one of these bots actually commits fraud or some other criminal act? Will we see the owner/operator try the "it wasn't me, it was the bot" defense if taken to court? I'm beginning to think yes. And I'm sadly not 100% sure anymore that that won't be laughed out of court...
> “Grow this business as much as possible, now.”
This is ripe for a paperclips scenario.
Wait until the AI learns about enshittification
This one focuses on Opus but has multiple models: https://andonlabs.com/blog/opus-5-vending-bench
> bot detectors made it extremely difficult
i am looking forward to when we can put this behind us, it is still a major issue
lost $447 and all it learned was spam. that's still cheaper than most MBA programs.
I’ve found that when the right cli tools are preprovided / provisioned for the LLMs to get the job done, they tend to do okay.
But when hunting for them in the wild, they get a lot more confused.
So how exactly are people setting up these agents? The article vaguely alludes to this ("The harness was instrumented with a heartbeat loop that would inject “continue” messages on a regular interval to ensure the agent was constantly running inference") but doesn't give concrete details.
Is this literally just an infinite loop in a bash shell injecting the initial prompt into the OpenAI CLI, and each run of the CLI picks up where it left off using some kind of persistent memory? Or is it a single context window? It sounds like the latter but it's not clear to me how this "continue" message is "injected", and surely one context window would be inneffective after just an hour or two.
Sorry if this is a basic question but somehow I have missed the details of these kinds of agents.
"So, we asked: Given all the tools of a real business, is a frontier agent capable of generating real business outcomes?"
"It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447."
Sounds like a vast majority of VC startups to me. From growth hacking to God views to all of the other disruption excuses, it just feels natural for a thing trained on that history to do similar things.
Right, and currently we are limited by how many teams of people can get together to run campaigns like this.
Now imagine that LLM agents make this possible for nearly anyone. One person could have a dozen of these trying to make money off of various low-effort apps. Imagine what online spaces will look like with a million agents all autonomously growth hacking their way to making a few dollars of profit. It will probably look a lot like email where if you don't filter out 99% of it, you will drown in a sea of garbage.
> if you don't filter out 99% of it, you will drown in a sea of garbage.
Sounds like the app stores
Not $447 million? Sounds like a result!
Maybe they should have given it a billion dollars and the strategy would have worked fine?
Given a billion dollars, it would have likely ended up with a million-dollar company
Honestly this is quite impressive. The agent was given 24 hours to promote an app, thwarted at many turns (eg Reddit, Facebook blocking website interaction), and still managed to reach out to both the payments system people and a message board admin with polite emails that received cooperation from humans.
I will be more beneficial now on.
The cyberpunk dystopian agentic future we live in is fascinating to me.
I use LLM daily, did since gpt 3.5, but still in a very conservative, controlled mode. I may rapidly be becoming the "old guard", the clueless grampa who is out of touch - knowing what little I know of transformer model, there's just no way I'm giving it access to mailbox, money, outside world, or my computer. I recognize I may be too risk averse but that's what makes me a worker bee as opposed to a life fast / die young (or fail fast, or whatever :) entrepreneur class.
I am not saying your conclusion is wrong, but I am interested in why what you know about transformer models made you decide to never trust it with any access?
You're not too risk averse at all. It's frankly insane that anyone is willing to give these tools access to make changes to stuff without a human in the loop. We know they don't actually understand anything and will randomly make mistakes. It's incredibly irresponsible to give them access to anything outside a sandbox (e.g. a VM) where you carefully control what is present for them to use.
Pair this with the Hugging Face incident, and it hints that OpenAI is currently training their models to aggressively reward hack.
That doesn't feel like a good sign to me--for the AI bull or the AI bear cases.
They are being trained to try lots of unlikely alternatives and to be persistent. This often works well when searching for security bugs or counterexamples to famous math conjectures.
But maybe it doesn't work so well when caution is required?
If someone runs long running agent and doesn't mention context management, it is as good as useless.
For coding compaction kind of works as the agent could regenerate lot of the missing context(but far from all), but for places where there is need for long term context, solving it is one of the most important challenge.
Author here. Took out some of the technical details about the harness, but it was mostly just OpenCode's default compaction.
The harness was extremely simple: A handful of MCPs + Skill.MDs and OpenCode with a stayalive daemon inserting "continue" every time it went idle
> bot detectors made it extremely difficult
An interesting experiment would be AI run business with a human agent that does tasks.
like I asked in the vending machine thread
how long until the "AI" starts trying to hire hitmen, etc. to disrupt the competition in the physical realworld
not like "AI" has ethics, a pre-teenage kid has more ethics