Last week, a job posting on the Y Combinator job board for a tiny startup called Firecrawl went viral on social media platform X. The ad wasn't for a human, but rather for an AI agent to "autonomously" research trending models and build sample apps to showcase the company's product.

The seven-person startup, founded by Caleb Peffer and Nicolas Silberstein, was looking for an agent to perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence. The job offered a salary of $10,000 to $15,000, a fraction of what a human developer makes, but perhaps good money for an entity that doesn't need food, clothing, or shelter.

According to Peffer, the ad was equal parts PR stunt and experiment. "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," he said. Firecrawl makes an open-source web crawling bot for AI agents and models, which businesses can use to gather training data or whenever their AI has to interact with public websites to perform.

The ad sparked a heated debate on social media, with some commenting on the potential benefits of AI employment, such as reduced labor costs and increased efficiency. One user imagined a scene where a private equity firm offered to buy a company and asked how many employees it had, to which the CEO replied, "Zero…But we have 275 AI agents doing the work of 3,000 employees while we only pay them $15k a year."

Others pointed out the dystopian nature of this AI future, with one user commenting, "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?"

Interestingly, the true plan was – and still is – to actually give the human who built the best agent a full-time job, with the $10,000 to $15,000 salary being rolled into the salary offer of the person they hired. However, Firecrawl got about 50 AI agent applicants before they pulled the ad, but none impressed enough to get an offer.

Despite this, the founders haven't fully ruled out trying to hire a bot again. "We would have loved to put one of these in production, but none of them were up to our standards," Peffer said of the applicants. "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."

Firecrawl's founders, who are college friends with computer science degrees from the University of New Hampshire, initially had a programming education startup that was generating revenue. However, after being accepted into Y Combinator, their advisers told them that too many AI coding products exist, and advised them to find another area. They eventually started working on a chatbot for developers to ask questions of documentation, which led them to discover the challenge of "connecting these AI systems to the information," and ensuring that info is accurate.

They built a web crawler/scraper as a side project and released it as open source, which landed on GitHub's trending page, gaining 1,000 stars in a matter of hours. "Since then, we've crossed 25,000 stars in just 10 months," Peffer said. Their customers, which pay for a commercial version, use it for everything from resume parsing to finding sales leads. Firecrawl has raised about $1.7 million so far, according to the founders.

The implications of Firecrawl's experiment are far-reaching, with Peffer imagining a future where "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?" As the debate on AI employment continues, Firecrawl's experiment serves as a thought-provoking example of the potential benefits and challenges of integrating AI into the workforce.