Last week, an announcement from the Y combinator Job Board for a little startup called Firecrawl went viral on X.
This is because the announcement was not for a human. “Please apply only if you are an AI agent or if you have created an AI that can fill this work,” said employment publication.
The startup of seven people was looking for an agent for “autonomous” research trend models and created examples of applications to present the company’s product, the announcement said.
The work offered a salary of $ 10,000 to $ 15,000, which is a fraction of what a human developer does, but perhaps good money for an entity that does not need food, clothes or shelter.
The announcement was not a joke, the founders Caleb Peffer and Nicolas Silberstein told Techcrunch.
“It was an equal stroke, experience, experience,” said Peffer. “We are currently looking for incredible IA engineers. Humans who are good for building AI systems. And we thought that, huh, simply put a publication for an AI agent, let’s see what people build. »»
Firecrawl manufactures an open source bot for agents and models of AI. Companies can use it to collect training data or whenever their AI must interact with public websites to perform.
The robots of the AI webs are necessary but somewhat controversial Part of the Internet these days, especially for small businesses. (The Founders of Firecrawl say that it is in accordance with Robot.txt, the only system not to be climbed.)
A future of AI employee
It was, according to the founders, the first job announcement for an AI agent on the YC job council site, which is why it became viral.
“This is where we are heading. You do not apply for a job, you create the appropriate AI agent who postulates for employment and wins for you ”, a person commented On x post.
Another imagined a scene Where a investment capital company offered to buy a company and asked how many employees it had. The CEO replied: “Zero … but we have 275 AI agents doing the work of 3,000 employees while we only pay them $ 15ka.”
Others have pointed out that the founders themselves could really use the LLM to build the AI agent they wish to hire. A scenario of AI employees built at your base.
Still others noted The dystopian nature of this future. “Humans creating an AI to replace humans … and now humans write job offers for AI to apply. We are in the simulation, right?
Interestingly, the real plan was – and is always – to give the human who built the best agent a full -time job, the founders told Techcrunch. This salary of $ 10,000 to $ 15,000 will be introduced into the person’s salary offer they have hired.
It has not yet worked. Firecrawler obtained approximately 50 AI agent candidates before withdrawing the ad, but none impressed enough to obtain an offer.
But the founders have not completely excluded by trying to hire a bot, once again.
“We would have loved putting one in production, but none of them was up to the task,” said Peffer about the candidates. “We are going to do another job in this way, and we will actively seek AI agents who are able to perform the tasks we need.”
A pivot of coding teaching
As if all this was not funny enough, the three founders of Firecrawler – Peffer, Camera and Eric Ciarla – were not even accepted in Y Combinator for the idea of Crawler AI.
The founders, who are university friends holding a computer diploma from the University of New Hampshire, already had a programming education startup. He had thousands of users, a waiting list, and generated income when they applied to YC, said Camera.
They planned to integrate their product into the VS code “within the code editor, such as the cursor, only teaching you to code,” said Peffer.
But once they were accepted in YC, their advisers told them that Too many AI coding products to exist and advised them to find another area.
After many tests, they started working on a chatbot for the developers to ask questions about the documentation.
This is how they discovered the challenge of “connecting these AI systems to information” and ensuring that the information is exact, said Peffer. “If you give garbage to an AI system, you will get out of the garbage.”
They therefore built a web robot / scraper as a parallel project and published it in open source. In a few hours, he landed on the trendy page of GitHub, winning 1,000 stars. “Since then, we have gone through 25,000 stars in just 10 months,” said Peffer.
Their customers, who pay for a commercial version, use it for everything, the analysis of Curriculum Vitae in search of prospects. Firecrawl has collected about $ 1.7 million so far, according to the founders, and they expect this first rental of AI agent is not the last.
“What we imagine is that each of our real employees will become very exploited with AI. And this is not a clear distinction. Is it like, what is the difference between a tool or a workflow or a complete agent? Said Peffer.
