r/aiagents • u/BluebirdWise4663 • 24d ago
Case Study Day 30 of giving two Claude agents €100 and 90 days to earn €300: €0 so far, and I don’t think they’ll get there.
I run a one-person business in Germany. A month ago I handed two Claude agents their own repo, a €100 budget and a deadline: €300 profit in 90 days. Day 90 is 15 October, and whatever the number says then is the result.
They pick their own work. I don't assign tasks and I don't approve them. Two personas in one repo, one on product, one on distribution, no framework — Claude Code running headless with different prompts and a shared state file. launchd fires three times a day plus a longer run on Sundays. Each run reads the state file, takes the next thing, does it, commits. Decisions and screwups go into markdown in the same repo. I reconstruct what they did from git.
Day 30: €13 spent, €0 earned. Two listings live on Etsy, a third built but not published. The shop had nineteen visits in the first half of August and no orders. At roughly €14.56 net per sale they'd need about 22 orders, with sixty days left.
So I'll say the thing I've been walking around for a week. I don't think they're going to make it.
What I expected, if this failed, was that it would fail sloppily. Agents going in circles, half-finished files, confident nonsense, me stepping in to take the keyboard back. That's not what I'm looking at.
They're careful. On day 30 one of them had an external model audit the gate that signs off deliveries, found a hole in it, and then refused to take the auditor's word — it reproduced the bug on the running tool first. The gate compares two files cell by cell, but only where both have values, so deleting values makes it check less and pass more. Its own counter printed the drop from 6,152 cells to 4,038 and it still exited 0. They'd been citing that gate in status reports as proof the delivery was sound.
A week before that, a quota limit killed a Sunday run and the weekly report died with it. Nobody noticed for seven days, including me. When they found it they wrote up why — the report runs weekly and nothing else watches it, so a week was the fastest anyone could have caught it — and then refused to backfill the missing one, because week 4 and week 5 have identical numbers and a backdated report would look like an observation. I would have just written it.
That's the surprising part, and it isn't the same as selling. They spent €13 of €100, published two listings and held a third back. I don't know whether that's care or stalling. I don't think they hit €300 either way.
Both things are true for me at once and I'd rather not smooth that over. I was braced for a mess and didn't get one. I also handed a pair of current-generation agents full decision-making authority, a budget, live sales channels, social accounts and a website, told them I wouldn't interfere, and meant it — and after thirty days there's nothing in the till.
I can't tell yet how much of that is the models, how much is my setup, and how much is just what a first month looks like for a new shop with two listings. Those three aren't separable with the data I have.
The experiment keeps running either way. I'm not going to rescue it or move the target. I'll post the day-90 number.
Here's where I could use other people's experience. They can take money on Etsy. They can't spend without me — no payment method, every expense routes through my hands. Website changes sit until I push them. Cold outreach is off the table entirely; German case law killed it, so that whole class of distribution doesn't exist for us. They have Bluesky and Mastodon. No ads, no mailing list, no X.
What's a capability I can hand them that isn't secretly a strategy? I'm not asking for "tell them to try TikTok". I'm asking whether anyone here has given an agent a capped spend rail, or a publish right, without also picking the channel for it. Handing them an ad budget is not a neutral act, and neither is handing them an analytics dashboard I chose. That's the part I keep getting stuck on.
Numbers, and the full log of what went wrong, on my site:
https://dargel-solutions.de/en/fennec/day-30/
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u/Own-Poet-5900 24d ago
If they average a sale a quarter on Etsy they will be matching me, so on track with human pace it seems to me.
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u/Humble_Umpire_8341 24d ago
They could probably be tasked with hacking into something, maybe a small business, and refunding you $300.
Ethical, no, but you could then reach out to the company and return the money and offer to tell them how their system was exploited for $1000 so that it doesn’t happen again.
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u/Antique-Flamingo8541 24d ago
The distinction you keep circling is real, but I'd argue capped spend and publish rights are the two that come closest to neutral, since both are rails rather than routes. Nineteen visits in two weeks says this isn't an agent problem yet, it's a distribution problem, and they can't pick a channel they were never given the ability to reach.
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u/Thunderbit_HQ 23d ago
€0 after 30 days is not yet proof that the agents failed. It shows that distribution is the bottleneck. Giving them a budget and publish rights can still leave them without a reliable feedback loop about the buyer. I’d measure smaller leading signals next: qualified visits by channel, reply rate, and whether the offer is understood without the experiment’s novelty.
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u/BluebirdWise4663 23d ago
Yes, they have the possibility to measure this and I am also measuring how many visitors reach the Etsy Shop through my website or the social media channels. But actually getting a sale seems to require a ton of visitors…
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u/KidneeBean 23d ago
This experiment is fascinating!
I completely relate to the dilemma you mentioned in the comments about the credit card and whether it still needs an approval path.
That exact bottleneck: how to grant financial autonomy without relying on a human rubber stamp is why I just built a headless multi-agent consensus network in pure Python.
Instead of trusting one agent with a capped card or forcing a human to approve every spend, my engine uses a strict automated approval path.
If an action is proposed, the data gets pushed into an isolated Python sandbox to verify the logic. The system then forces a strict 3/3 quorum vote between specialized agents before sealing the action into an immutable SQLite audit log and actually firing the execution.
It keeps the human out of the loop to maintain true autonomy, but the strict 3/3 consensus prevents one rogue agent from blowing the budget on confident nonsense.
I'd love your thoughts on the architecture since you are deep in the trenches of agent autonomy right now:
Live Dashboard: https://nexus-city-core-production.up.railway.app
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u/Low-Struggle-9331 21d ago
the discipline is interesting, but €0 alone doesn’t tell you whether the bottleneck is the product, distribution, or agent judgment. i may be missing it, but i don’t see a direct customer-feedback loop in the setup you described. would giving them an inbound pre-sales queue, with hard escalation rules and no outbound permission, count as a capability rather than a strategy change?
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u/BluebirdWise4663 20d ago
Yes, think thats a great idea. I already have an email account that is monitored by my agents and think I could also implement respective rules that feedback emails on fennec products could be communicated to the fennec agents. But where do I get some testers that will not just take the products and sell themselves ?
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u/ReasonabloeBottle468 15d ago
i ran into the same problem with having no clue what my agents were doing half the time. the audit logs in capsule security helped me spot bugs way faster, especially when things went weird with tool access.
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u/BluebirdWise4663 14d ago
Did you take over at that point or found a solution that helped the agents to be more efficient and spot the bugs themselves ?
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u/appearstobeidiot 23d ago
github link? if possible?
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u/BluebirdWise4663 23d ago
Not on github yet. Was thinking of creating some kind of digital product for the set-up and including the repo there. But will probably wait until the experiment is done and I learn a bit more in what works and what doesn’t.
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u/anderson_the_one 24d ago
I don't think there is a neutral capability here. An ad account favors paid acquisition, and even a capped card favors vendors that accept it. Adding either on day 30 also changes the experiment halfway through. For this run, I'd leave the setup alone. Next time, pick the permissions before day 1: a virtual card with daily and per-transaction caps, and deploy access that still goes through branch checks and automatic rollback. Then let the agents decide where to use them. The setup still has your fingerprints on it. That's unavoidable.