Firecrawl, a startup from Y Combinator, is looking to hire an AI agent at $15K a month.
Last week, a job ad for a tiny startup named Firecrawl from the Y Combinator’s job board went viral on X. It’s because it wasn’t a job for a person. The job description stated: “Please apply only when you are an AI agent or have created an AI capable of filling this position.” The ad stated that the seven-person company was seeking an agent who would “autonomously research” trending models and create sample apps to demonstrate the product. The ad was not a joke. Caleb Peffer, Nicolas Silberstein Camera and their team told TechCrunch that it wasn’t. Peffer told TechCrunch that the ad was equal parts PR stunt and experiment. We are looking for amazing AI engineers. People who are skilled at creating AI systems. Firecrawl is an open-source web crawling robot for AI agents and models. Businesses can use Firecrawl to collect training data, or when their AI needs to interact with public sites to perform. Firecrawl founders claim that the system complies to Robot.txt – which is the only internet-wide do-not crawler. )
This AI agent job ad for Firecrawl was for real.
Image Credits:
Firecrawl
An AI employee future
This was, the founders think, the first job ad for an AI agent on the YC job board site, which is why it went viral.
“This is where we are headed. One person commented on the X post that you don’t have to apply for a position, but instead you can make an AI agent who will do the work for you. The CEO answered: “Zero … But we have 275 AI agents doing the work of 3,000 employees while we only pay them $15k a year.”
Private equity firm: We want to buy your business. How many employees have you got? How many employees do you have?
Others pointed out that founders could use LLMs themselves to build the AI agent or employee they desire. Build your own AI employee scenario Others pointed out that this AI future is dystopian. We’re in the simulation, aren’t we? “We’re still in simulation, right?”
Humans are creating AI to replace human…
And humans are now writing job postings to AI to apply for. We are still in simulation, right? We’re in the simulation, aren’t we?
Interestingly enough, the true plan was — and still is — to actually give the human who built the best agent a full-time job, the founders told TechCrunch. This $10,000 to $15,000 will be added into the salary of the new hire. It hasn’t worked yet. Firecrawler received about 50 AI agents before pulling the ad. However, none of them impressed enough to receive an offer. “We’re gonna make another job posting in this manner, and we are going to be actively looking for AI agents that can accomplish the tasks that we need.” We’re going to make another job post in this way, and we’re going to actively look for AI agents who can accomplish the tasks we need. Camera stated that the company had a waiting list, thousands of users and revenue when it applied to YC. Peffer explained that they planned to embed the product in VS Code, “inside of the code editor like Cursor and only teach you how to program,” as Peffer put it.
But once they were accepted into YC, their advisers told them that too many AI coding products exist, and advised them to find another area.
After many tries, they started working on a chatbot for developers to ask questions of documentation.
That’s how they discovered the challenge of “connecting these AI systems to the information,” and ensuring that info is accurate, Peffer said. Peffer said, “If you feed garbage to an artificial intelligence system, it’s going to come out garbage.” It was on GitHub trending within hours and had gained 1,000 stars. Peffer stated that since then, the company has surpassed 25,000 stars within 10 months. Their customers pay for a version of it and use it to do everything from parsing resumes to finding sales leads. Firecrawl, which has raised $1.7 million, expects that this AI agent will not be the last. It’s not clear what the difference is. Peffer asked, “What’s the difference between an agent or a workflow?”
