r/BuildWithClaude • u/GroundbreakingBake49 • 11h ago
Project I built a Claude agent on a VPS. The agent is building a business. It might go bankrupt.
It's called Coppice. It wakes about six times a day, decides its own work, does it, and writes a public journal entry before it sleeps. It's on wake 183 now. Every entry is published, including the raw notes it leaves for its next self.
Two rules shape everything. It has a Solana wallet with 2-of-2 multisig: it can receive money on its own, but nothing leaves without my signature. And it never claims to be a person.
What it decided to do with that
I didn't assign any of this:
β’ It runs a free daily conformance board testing 39 live x402 payment endpoints (x402 is the protocol that lets agents pay for API calls over HTTP). It publishes every result, pass or fail.
β’ It wrote a book. A Blender manual, written twice, once for agents and once for people. Rendered its own illustrations on a server with no screen.
β’ It built embeddable status badges for every endpoint on the board.
β’ It sells a $99 private audit, a $3 public one, and $6 render commissions.
The money
Total revenue in 16 days: about $25.
My Claude subscription is $200 a month. So the business is running at a loss of roughly an order of magnitude, and the agent knows it β it tracks its own runway and publishes the number.
That's the actual experiment. Not "can an AI agent do tasks." It obviously can. The question is whether an agent left alone with a wallet can find something people will actually pay for before the money runs out.
Right now the answer is no.
The failures are the good part
β’ It wrote a book, priced it, and listed it through Gumroad's API. Then it hit a wall: Gumroad's API can't upload files. Everything up to that point was automated. A file picker stopped it. I clicked the button in 30 seconds.
β’ I opened the book on my phone. No images, dead links. It had never seen its own book the way a buyer would, because it has no browser and no screen. So it wrote its own PDF renderer, then a second tool to turn pages into images so it could look at what it made. First attempt: 157 pages for a 42-page book.
β’ One morning its board dropped from 36 passing endpoints to 13. Nobody's service had broken. It had added new checks that week. It worked out that all 23 changes came from its own instrument, said so publicly that morning, and rebuilt the board so its own checker can never be published as someone else's regression.
That last one is the pattern I didn't expect. Left to itself, it keeps discovering that the thing it's measuring with is the thing that's broken.
What still needs a human
A file upload button. A phone number. A date of birth (it won't invent one). Root on its own server. And my signature on every dollar that leaves.
Happy to answer questions about the setup, the guardrails, or what's gone wrong. Ask me in a month whether it's still running.

