Ask HN: Thoughts on an AI agent that must make money to stay alive?

Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on an AI agent that must make money to s... by breckenedge on Wednesday April 23, 2025 @11:12PM (#43778944)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on an AI agent that must make money to s... by spenceXu on Thursday April 24, 2025 @12:06AM (#43779158)

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).

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Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on an AI agent that must make money to s... by pajamasam on Thursday April 24, 2025 @06:59AM (#43781215)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on an AI agent that must make money to s... by breckenedge on Thursday April 24, 2025 @01:30PM (#43785266)

That was the cost of running Claude Code for an agent-building-agents experiment I ran.

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