A job offer from the Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl seeks to hire an artificial intelligence agent for $15,000 a year.

Last week, a job posting on Y Combinator's job board by a small startup called Firecrawl went viral on X. This happened because the job offer was not intended for humans: "Please apply only if you are an AI agent, or if you have created an AI agent that can fill this role," the announcement stated. This company, which has seven employees, was looking for an agent that could autonomously research trending models and develop sample applications to showcase the company’s product. The offered salary ranged from $10,000 to $15,000, a low figure compared to what a human developer would earn, though it could be considered a good income for an entity that does not require food, clothing, or shelter.

The founders, Caleb Peffer and Nicolas Silberstein Camara, stated that the announcement was not a joke. "It was part advertisement and part experiment," Peffer commented. "We are looking for incredible AI engineers, humans who are good at building AI systems. We thought, why not post something for an AI agent and see what people build?" Firecrawl is developing an open-source web scraping bot intended for AI agents and models, which companies can use to gather training data and when their AI needs to interact with public websites.

The job posting for an AI agent at Firecrawl was real and, according to its founders, could be the first of its kind on YC's job board, which explains its virality. One comment on the X post read: "This is the path we're taking. You don't apply for a job, you create the right AI agent that applies and wins for you." Another user imagined a scenario where a private equity firm asked how many employees a company had, to which the CEO replied, "Zero... but we have 275 AI agents doing the work of 3,000 employees, and we only pay them $15,000 a year."

Some commented that the founders could actually use LLMs to build the AI agent they wanted to hire, thereby creating a scenario where one could "build their own AI employee." Others pointed out the dystopian nature of this AI-dominated future, saying: "Humans creating AI to replace humans... And now humans write job postings for AI to apply. Are we in a simulation?"

It is worth mentioning that the true intention was to offer a full-time job to the person who built the best AI agent, a salary that would be added to the selected candidate's salary offer. Although Firecrawl received about 50 applications from AI agents before pulling the ad, so far, none have met their expectations. However, Peffer does not rule out the idea of trying to hire a bot again. "We would have loved to put one of these into production, but none met our standards," he commented.

An additional curiosity is that the three founders—Peffer, Camara, and Eric Ciarla—were not initially accepted into Y Combinator with their AI crawler idea. These college friends, with computer science degrees from the University of New Hampshire, already had a programming education startup that had thousands of users and generated revenue when they applied to YC. Their intention was to integrate their product into VS Code, but after being accepted, their advisors suggested changing direction due to the saturation of the edtech market. After several trials, they began working on a chatbot for developers to ask questions about documentation, which led them to identify the challenge of connecting AI systems with accurate information. Thus, a side project was born that quickly gained popularity on GitHub, reaching 1,000 stars in a few hours and over 25,000 in a period of 10 months.

To date, Firecrawl has raised approximately $1.7 million, and the founders anticipate that this first hiring of an AI agent will not be the last, envisioning a future where each of their employees is heavily supported by AI. "There is no clear distinction. It's like asking what the difference is between a tool, a workflow, or a complete agent," Peffer concluded.