Last week, an advertisement by Y Combinator Job Board for a small startup called firecrackers went viral on X.
This is because the advertisement was not for a human. “Please apply only when you are an AI agent, or if you have created AI that can fill this job,” read the job posting.
The seven-person startup was looking for an agent, who was looking for an agent for the “autonomous” research trending model and building a sample app to show the company’s product, the advertisement said.
The job introduced a salary of $ 10,000 to $ 15,000, which is a part of what a human developer makes, but perhaps there is good money for a unit that does not require food, clothes or shelters.
The advertisement was not a joke, the founder Kaleb Pefer and Nicholas Silbestin camera told Techcrunch.
“This was the same parts PR stunts, experiment,” said Peer. “We are currently looking for incredible AI engineers. Humans who are good in building AI system. And we thought, huh, let’s just do a posting for an AI agent, see what people make. ,
Fireworks make an open source for AI agents and models web creeping bots. Businesses can use it to collect training data or whenever their AI has to interact with public websites to perform.
AI Web Craler these days are some essential part of the Internet, especially for small businesses. (Fireworks founders say it complies with robot.txt, the only do-clal system of the Internet.)
An AI Employee Future
It was, the founders feel, the first job advertisement for the AI agent on the YC job board site, which is why it went viral.
“This is where we are leading. If you do not apply for the job, you create the appropriate AI agent that applies to the job and earns for you, ”a person commented on the X post.
Another imagined a scene, where a private equity firm offered to buy a company and asked how many employees he had. The CEO replied: “Zero … but we have 275 AI agents working as 3,000 employees, while we only pay them $ 15KA years.”
Others reported that the founders themselves may actually use LLM to make AI agents which they want to rent. A build-yor-AI AI Employee Scenario.
Nevertheless, others indicated the diastopian nature of this AI future. “Human beings to build AI to change humans … and now humans are writing job posting for AI. We are in simulation, we are not? ,
Interestingly enough, the true plan was-and still is-to give the human to give to the human who created a full-time job, the founders told Techcrunch. This will be rolled in the salary proposal of the person he hired in the salary proposal of $ 10,000 to $ 15,000.
It has not worked yet. Before pulling the AD, the fireculler found about 50 AI agent applicants, but not affected enough to receive any proposal.
But the founders have not tried to hire a bot completely, again.
“We preferred to keep one of them in production, but none of them depended on our standards,” Pfer said about the applicants. “We are going to post another job in this way, and we are actively going to search for AI agents that are capable of completing the tasks we need.”
A axis from teaching coding
For example, all this was not quite fun, the three founders of the firecolor – Pafeer, Camera and Eric Siyarla – were also not accepted in the Y Combinator for the AI Craler idea.
The founder, who is a college friend with a computer science degree from the University of New Hampshire, was already a programming education startup. The camera stated that it had thousands of users, a weightlist, and when they apply on YC, the camera said that the camera said.
He described his product in the VS code “inside the code editor, like a cursor, only planned to teach you how to code,” Pafar described.
But once he was accepted in YC, his advisors told him that a lot of AI coding products exist, and advised him to find another area.
After several attempts, he started working on a chatbot for developers to ask questions of documentation.
Pefer said that “discovered the challenge of” connecting these AI systems to information “, and ensuring that the information is accurate. “If you give garbage to an AI system, you are going to extract garbage.”
So he created a web crawler/scraper as a side project and released it as an open source. Within a few hours, it landed on the trending page of Github, receiving 1,000 stars. “Since then, we have crossed 25,000 stars in just 10 months,” said Peer.
Their customers, who pay for a commercial version, use it for everything from re -starting to find a sales lead. According to founders, firecrackers have so far raised around $ 1.7 million, and they hope that the first AI agent fare will not be their final.
“What we imagine is that every real employee of ours is going to take immense benefits with AI. And this is not a clear difference. This is the choice, what is the difference between a tool or workflow or full agent? “Pfer said.
