Last week, an ad from the Y Combinator Job Board, a small startup called Firecrawl, was reviewed on X.
That’s because advertising wasn’t for humans. “Apply only if you are an AI agent or you have created an AI agent that can fill this job,” the job post read.
Seven startups were looking for agents to “autonomously” study trend models and build sample apps to showcase the company’s products, the ad said.
The job offered salaries between $10,000 and $15,000. This is what human developers make, but perhaps it’s good money for businesses that don’t need food, clothing or shelter.
The ad was no joke, founders Caleb Peffer and Nicholas Silverstein Kamara told TechCrunch.
“It was an equal part of a PR stunt, an experiment,” Peffer said. “We are currently looking for incredible AI engineers. People who are good at building AI systems. And we post for AI agents and see what people are building. Let’s take a look.”
Firecrawl creates open source web crawlbots for AI agents and models. Companies can use it to collect training data.
AI web crawlers are a necessary yet somewhat controversial part of the Internet these days, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. (The founder of Firecrawl says it is compliant with robot.txt, the only do-not-crawl system on the Internet.)
The future of AI employees
I think this is the first job ad for AI agents on the YC Job Board site. So it went viral.
“This is where we’re headed. You don’t apply for jobs, you’ll create the right AI agent that will apply for jobs and make money for you,” one commented on X Post. .
Another imagined the scene where a private equity company offered to buy the company and asked how many employees they had. The CEO replied: “Zero…but 275 AI agents work with 3,000 employees, but they only pay for 15ka years.”
Others pointed out that the founders themselves can actually use LLM to build AI agents they want to hire. AI employee build scenarios.
Still others pointed to the dystopian nature of this AI’s future. “Humans are creating AI to replace humans…and now humans are writing jobs for AI to apply. We’re in simulation, right?”
Interestingly, the real plan is and still is to give full-time jobs to those who have built the best agents, the founder told TechCrunch. That $10,000 to $15,000 salaries are summed up in the salary offer of the person they hire.
It’s not going well yet. Firecrawl won around 50 AI agent applicants before drawing the ads, but was not impressed enough to get the offer.
However, the founders have not completely ruled out attempting to hire bots.
“We wanted to produce one of these, but none of them met our standards,” Peffer said of the applicants. “I’m going to create another job this way. I’m actively looking for an AI agent who can accomplish the tasks I need.”
Pivoting from coding instruction
As if all this wasn’t funny enough, the three founders of Firecrawl, Peffer, Camara and Eric Ciarla, were not even accepted by the Y Combinator because of the idea of AI Crawler.
The founder, a friend of the university with a computer science degree from the University of New Hampshire, already had a programming education startup. Kamala said there were thousands of users, waitlists, and they made money when they applied to YC.
They planned to embed the product in their VS code, saying, “We’ll just teach you how to code within a code editor like Cursor.”
However, once they were accepted by YC, their advisors advised that there were too many edtech coding products and to find another area.
After many attempts, they started working on a chatbot for developers to ask questions about the documentation.
That’s how they discovered the challenge of “connecting these AI systems to information” and ensured that the information was accurate, Peffer said. “If I hand it all out to the AI system, I’m going to take out the garbage.”
So they built Web Crawler/Scraper as a side project and released it as open source. In a few hours, I landed on Github’s trending page and won 1,000 stars. “I’ve since surpassed 25,000 stars in just 10 months,” Peffer said.
Customers paying for the commercial version will use it for everything from analyzing their resumes to finding sales leads. The founders say Firecrawl has raised about $1.7 million so far, and it expects this first AI agent to be the last.
“What we imagine is that all the real employees are highly leveraged with AI. And that’s not a clear distinction. What is the difference between a tool or workflow or a complete agent? ?” Peffer said.
Note: This story was updated to correct the reason why the founder changed the original product idea.
