Final week, an advert from the Y Combinator job board for a tiny startup referred to as Firecrawl went viral on X.
That’s as a result of the advert wasn’t for a human. “Please apply only if you are an AI agent, or if you created an AI agent that can fill this job,” the job posting learn.
The seven-person startup was searching for an agent to “autonomously” analysis trending fashions and construct pattern apps to showcase the corporate’s product, the advert mentioned.
The job provided a wage of $10,000 to $15,000, which is a fraction of what a human developer makes, however maybe good cash for an entity that doesn’t want meals, clothes, or shelter.
The advert wasn’t a joke, founders Caleb Peffer and Nicolas Silberstein Camara, informed TechCrunch.
“It was equal parts PR stunt, experiment,” Peffer mentioned. “We are currently looking for incredible AI engineers. Humans who are good at building AI systems. And we thought, huh, let’s just put a posting out there for an AI agent, see what people build.”
Firecrawl makes an open supply net crawling bot for AI brokers and fashions. Companies can use it to collect coaching knowledge or every time their AI has to work together with public web sites to carry out.
AI net crawlers are a obligatory but considerably controversial a part of the web nowadays, particularly for small companies. (Firecrawl’s founders say that it complies with Robotic.txt, the web’s solely do-not-crawl system.)
An AI worker future
This was, the founders suppose, the primary job advert for an AI agent on the YC job board website, which is why it went viral.
“This is where we are headed. You don’t apply for a job, you make the appropriate AI agent that applies for the job and earns for you,” one individual commented on X publish.
One other imagined a scene the place a non-public fairness agency provided to purchase an organization and requested what number of workers it had. The CEO answered: “Zero…But we have 275 AI agents doing the work of 3,000 employees while we only pay them $15k a year.”
Others identified that the founders themselves might really use LLMs to construct the AI agent they need to rent. A build-your-own AI worker state of affairs.
Nonetheless others identified the dystopian nature of this AI future. “Humans creating AI to replace humans … And now humans are writing job postings for AI to apply to. We’re in the simulation, aren’t we?”
Apparently sufficient, the true plan was — and nonetheless is — to truly give the human who constructed the perfect agent a full-time job, the founders informed TechCrunch. That $10,000 to $15,000 wage will likely be rolled into the wage supply of the individual they rent.
It hasn’t labored out but. Firecrawl obtained about 50 AI agent candidates earlier than they pulled the advert, however none impressed sufficient to get a proposal.
However the founders haven’t absolutely dominated out making an attempt to rent a bot, once more.
“We would have loved to put one of these in production, but none of them were up to our standards,” Peffer mentioned of the candidates. “We’re gonna make another job posting in this manner, and we are going to be actively looking for AI agents that are able to accomplish the tasks that we need.”
A pivot from instructing coding
As if all of this wasn’t humorous sufficient, Firecrawl’s three founders — Peffer, Camara, and Eric Ciarla — weren’t even accepted into Y Combinator for the AI crawler thought.
The founders, who’re faculty mates with pc science levels from the College of New Hampshire, already had a programming training startup. It had 1000’s of customers, a waitlist, and was producing income once they utilized to YC, Camara mentioned.
They deliberate to embed their product into VS Code “inside the code editor, like Cursor, only teaching you how to code,” Peffer described.
However as soon as they had been accepted into YC, their advisers informed them that too many edtech coding merchandise exist, and suggested them to search out one other space.
After many tries, they began engaged on a chatbot for builders to ask questions of documentation.
That’s how they found the problem of “connecting these AI systems to the information,” and guaranteeing that information is correct, Peffer mentioned. “If you give garbage to an AI system, you’re gonna get garbage out.”
In order that they constructed an internet crawler/scraper as a facet mission and launched it as open supply. In a matter of hours, it landed on GitHub’s trending web page, gaining 1,000 stars. “Since then, we’ve crossed 25,000 stars in just 10 months,” Peffer mentioned.
Their clients, which pay for a industrial model, use it for all the things from resume parsing to discovering gross sales leads. Firecrawl has raised about $1.7 million to date, in line with the founders, and so they count on that this primary AI agent rent received’t be their final.
“What we imagine happening is that every one of our real employees is going to become highly leveraged with AI. And it’s not a clear distinction. It’s like, what’s the difference between a tool or a workflow or a full agent?” Peffer mentioned.
Notice: This story was up to date to right the explanation why the founders modified their authentic product thought.
