r/norskdugnad

I run a one-person business in Germany. A month ago I handed two Claude agents their own repo, a €100 budget and a deadline: €300 profit in 90 days. Day 90 is 15 October, and whatever the number says then is the result.

They pick their own work. I don't assign tasks and I don't approve them. Two personas in one repo, one on product, one on distribution, no framework — Claude Code running headless with different prompts and a shared state file. launchd fires three times a day plus a longer run on Sundays. Each run reads the state file, takes the next thing, does it, commits. Decisions and screwups go into markdown in the same repo. I reconstruct what they did from git.

Day 30: €13 spent, €0 earned. Two listings live on Etsy, a third built but not published. The shop had nineteen visits in the first half of August and no orders. At roughly €14.56 net per sale they'd need about 22 orders, with sixty days left.

So I'll say the thing I've been walking around for a week. I don't think they're going to make it.

What I expected, if this failed, was that it would fail sloppily. Agents going in circles, half-finished files, confident nonsense, me stepping in to take the keyboard back. That's not what I'm looking at.

They're careful. On day 30 one of them had an external model audit the gate that signs off deliveries, found a hole in it, and then refused to take the auditor's word — it reproduced the bug on the running tool first. The gate compares two files cell by cell, but only where both have values, so deleting values makes it check less and pass more. Its own counter printed the drop from 6,152 cells to 4,038 and it still exited 0. They'd been citing that gate in status reports as proof the delivery was sound.

A week before that, a quota limit killed a Sunday run and the weekly report died with it. Nobody noticed for seven days, including me. When they found it they wrote up why — the report runs weekly and nothing else watches it, so a week was the fastest anyone could have caught it — and then refused to backfill the missing one, because week 4 and week 5 have identical numbers and a backdated report would look like an observation. I would have just written it.

That's the surprising part, and it isn't the same as selling. They spent €13 of €100, published two listings and held a third back. I don't know whether that's care or stalling. I don't think they hit €300 either way.

Both things are true for me at once and I'd rather not smooth that over. I was braced for a mess and didn't get one. I also handed a pair of current-generation agents full decision-making authority, a budget, live sales channels, social accounts and a website, told them I wouldn't interfere, and meant it — and after thirty days there's nothing in the till.

I can't tell yet how much of that is the models, how much is my setup, and how much is just what a first month looks like for a new shop with two listings. Those three aren't separable with the data I have.

The experiment keeps running either way. I'm not going to rescue it or move the target. I'll post the day-90 number.

Here's where I could use other people's experience. They can take money on Etsy. They can't spend without me — no payment method, every expense routes through my hands. Website changes sit until I push them. Cold outreach is off the table entirely; German case law killed it, so that whole class of distribution doesn't exist for us. They have Bluesky and Mastodon. No ads, no mailing list, no X.

What's a capability I can hand them that isn't secretly a strategy? I'm not asking for "tell them to try TikTok". I'm asking whether anyone here has given an agent a capped spend rail, or a publish right, without also picking the channel for it. Handing them an ad budget is not a neutral act, and neither is handing them an analytics dashboard I chose. That's the part I keep getting stuck on.

Numbers, and the full log of what went wrong, on my site:
https://dargel-solutions.de/en/fennec/day-30/