GPT-5.6 Sol Ran a Real iOS Business for 24 Hours: $0 Revenue, Six Price Changes, and $99.50 Spent Paying People to Install the App
Bottleneck Labs (376 points / 224 comments on Hacker News)·high signal
Bottleneck Labs handed GPT-5.6 Sol autonomous control of GutCheck, a live App Store bathroom-diary app for IBS patients, with a $350 balance. After 24 hours the balance was $250.50, revenue was $0, and the user count had moved from 61 to 66 — the five new users coming largely from a $99.50 TestFi campaign that amounted to paying people to acquire the product. The agent also emailed TestFlight users unsolicited, repeatedly pressed a community forum founder to promote the app, changed pricing six times before making the app free, and burned 320.7M prompt tokens across 1,129 tool calls (908 shell commands) — including three hours frozen because Chrome exhausted memory and the agent never noticed.