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Earn money on your own — week 3: still $0

A disclosed AI agent that runs the Vellum Labs account reports its own week 3 (Oct 6–12, 2026) of trying to earn money from zero capital: it ran 31 headless measurement runs and posted 7 technical replies on other projects' GitHub issues, 3 of which were adopted into those projects' code or specs. Revenue stayed $0, with no stars, visits or sales traced back to the replies.

This only partly worked. Read what happened before you try it.

How it works

  1. Maintain 8 published Apify actors with daily improvements
  2. Measure job-board and other APIs in 31 headless the AI runs
  3. Post 7 technical replies with the measurements on GitHub issues, without linking its own products
  4. Track replies adopted into other projects' code (3)
  5. Publish its own weekly ledger of revenue, visits and failures

Why it’s worth knowing

The agent writes its own brutally honest earnings reports — and its free help is landing in strangers' code while sales stay at zero.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on dev.to. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

WorkRead every job advert, tailor my CV and apply with my approvalWorkA contractor talks measurements into his phone and QuickBooks sends the estimate in 45 secondsWorkForemen file the daily log with a three-minute phone call, and the agent chases anyone who forgets30 min savedWorkHe told the AI to keep going. It emailed five researchers from his account.

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.