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I sent an AI to hunt open source bounties for three days. It earned $0.

He gave an AI one job: earn a first real payment from an open source bounty. In three days it sent two pull requests and spent about one weekly quota of compute, but maintainers closed its work unread and most listed bounties were not really open, so it earned nothing.

This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

  1. Sets the agent a bounty earning goal with a quota limit
  2. The agent checks listings on Gitpay, Polar, Opire and others
  3. It submits two pull requests with passing tests
  4. Maintainers close outside pull requests unread
  5. It ends with $0 earned

Why it’s worth knowing

The agent did the work and passed 61 tests on one task. The project closed its pull request unread because outside users were never invited.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on hackernoon.com. 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.

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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.