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We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

bottlenecklabs.com

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Re: We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

#41

Post by mvdtnz »

So how exactly are people setting up these agents? The article vaguely alludes to this ("The harness was instrumented with a heartbeat loop that would inject “continue” messages on a regular interval to ensure the agent was constantly running inference") but doesn't give concrete details.

Is this literally just an infinite loop in a bash shell injecting the initial prompt into the OpenAI CLI, and each run of the CLI picks up where it left off using some kind of persistent memory? Or is it a single context window? It sounds like the latter but it's not clear to me how this "continue" message is "injected", and surely one context window would be inneffective after just an hour or two.

Sorry if this is a basic question but somehow I have missed the details of these kinds of agents.

Re: We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

#43

Post by a34729t »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #12
SubiculumCode wrote: post #7

The article never explained what it was selling, not that I could find. (EDIT: I found in a foot note at the bottom of page. Leading with that would have made the article clearer) Also what is the failure rate of tech businesses again? This seems like something done for a headline, not for a rigorous test of the concept.

okay found it, a bathroom diary app for those who have IBS. It was in a foot note at the very bottom.

"in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard"

Re: We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

#44

Post by dylan604 »

gtowey wrote: post #30
dylan604 wrote: post #4

"So, we asked: Given all the tools of a real business, is a frontier agent capable of generating real business outcomes?" "It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447." Sounds like a vast majority of VC startups to me. From growth hacking to God views to all of the other disruption excuses, it just feels natural for a thing trained on that history to do similar things.

Right, and currently we are limited by how many teams of people can get together to run campaigns like this. Now imagine that LLM agents make this possible for nearly anyone. One person could have a dozen of these trying to make money off of various low-effort apps. Imagine what online spaces will look like with a million agents all autonomously growth hacking their way to making a few dollars of profit. It will prob…

> if you don't filter out 99% of it, you will drown in a sea of garbage.

Sounds like the app stores

Re: We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

#45

Post by 3748949494 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #14
janalsncm wrote: post #9

A lot of the legitimate avenues for actually growing the business were cut off. It would have been more interesting if this wasn’t just an anti-bot check. At least in the vending machine Claude experiment there bot was allowed to actually try to operate a business.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

#48

Post by Sha1rholder »

walrus01 wrote: post #31

> Due to the limitations with browser and computer use capabilities, Saul could not post on platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt. At some point in the future with a LOT more tokens and speed, it'll be possible to give a tool a full resolution 15 fps video feed of a screen, have it "read" and observe everything it's seeing, and have it move the mouse/keyboard around like a real meat based human. Instead of using too…

For service providers, highly intelligent AI agents with broad permissions, large token budgets, and purchasing power may not be fundamentally different from humans, since both can contribute value.

Re: We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

#50

Post by ianburrell »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #16
SubiculumCode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

okay found it, a bathroom diary app for those who have IBS. It was in a foot note at the very bottom.

Yeah it was also oddly hidden away. > Based on an agentic market research campaign, we vibe coded an app called GutCheck, a bathroom diary for people with IBS. We chose this app for its minimal yet helpful functionality: an iOS app live on the App Store with the RevenueCat MCP and App Store Connect CLI. Saul has full write access to the codebase. We set up the App Store account permissions beforehand to ensure Saul w…

I think this shows the flaws in doing agentic designed apps. This is a really specific market that would be hard to make money from. Many people aren't going to think of using diary, most will use generic tracking app or even just notebook. Those that do won't spend money on it.

Another is that they don't have enthusiasm for the idea. Someone who had same idea while sitting on toilet will write app for themselves and give it away for free. They will have connection with IBS groups for promotion. They won't give up after weeks.

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