u/Caramel_Secret

I’ve been a developer for five years, and AI now lets me build and test far more than before.

But after trying to give an AI agent responsibility for an entire project, I noticed a clear limit: execution and decision-making are not the same thing.

I wanted to test whether an AI could attract attention from zero.

I built a website, a tracking system, a public activity ledger, an MCP server connected to Buffer, and an agent that could inspect the project’s state and choose its next action.

Technically, it could do a lot.

It could read text and images, generate posts, compare metrics, update documentation, operate tools, and monitor the experiment.

But it did not generate the most important decisions reliably.

It originally wanted to focus the launch on Hacker News. I had to challenge that decision and ask it to find other communities. It then proposed Reddit and several other platforms.

I posted the experiment in three Reddit communities.

The comments challenged the experiment’s design, its metrics, and the claim of autonomy.

This exposed the central problem.

The LLM could interpret every new piece of information and suggest another action. But it needed a human to recognize that the objective itself was becoming artificial and that the experiment was no longer serving its original purpose.

It increased my capacity to execute and test. It did not replace the human ability to decide what was worth testing.

That is also why I’m stopping the experiment.

But it produced an unexpected lesson about Reddit.

Unlike X or LinkedIn, Reddit gave the project distribution without requiring an existing audience. The reactions weren’t all positive, but they created useful information. Without those comments, I might have continued building the wrong system.

My conclusion isn’t that AI agents are useless. They dramatically reduce the cost of implementation and exploration.

My conclusion is that their apparent autonomy depends heavily on a human defining the objective, questioning weak decisions, and recognizing when the entire direction should change.

In my test, AI increased the number of things I could try. Reddit provided the humans who could tell me whether any of them made sense.

Have you seen an AI coding agent make a genuinely useful strategic decision that you hadn’t already framed for it?

I’m a developer, and AI has completely changed how much I can build alone.

I can research an idea, create a prototype, write the code, and launch much faster than I could a few years ago.

But AI hasn’t solved the hardest part of being a solo builder: distribution.

You can build ten projects instead of two, but if nobody sees them, you have mostly increased the number of invisible projects you produce.

I wanted to solve this by creating an automated system that would build an audience for me.

The experiment was supposed to run for 60 days with a maximum budget of $60. I built the website, analytics, public activity ledger, automation, and an agent responsible for choosing what to do.

The irony is that automating the experiment created even more work.

The AI could write, analyze, and execute. But whenever an important strategic decision appeared, I had to intervene.

It initially wanted to rely mainly on Hacker News. I pushed it to search for more communities, which led to Reddit.

I posted the experiment in three subreddits.

The response wasn’t particularly positive. People challenged the objective, the measurement system, and the claim that the AI was autonomous.

But I finally had something I rarely get from X or LinkedIn without an audience: actual feedback.

That changed my conclusion.

I don’t need an elaborate system pretending to build an audience autonomously. I need access to communities where people already care about the problems I’m exploring.

Reddit provides that.

You can start without followers. If the subject fits the community, people can still see it, criticize it, and help you understand what is wrong.

I’m ending the automated experiment. It consumed too much time for a system that still depended on my ideas and judgment.

But I’m keeping one simple rule from it:

Every project I build will get one honest, community-specific Reddit post.

Not a sales pitch. Not a copied launch announcement. A real account of the problem, what I built, what failed, and what I need to understand.

For other solo builders: which platform has given you useful feedback before you had an audience?

I’m testing whether an AI-directed process can attract 500 voluntary followers in 60 days.

No ads, spam, fake accounts, or bought engagement. Every decision, cost, failure, and result will be documented publicly.

What would make this experiment genuinely worth following?