AI agent ran a business, paid $99.50 for installs

Bottleneck Labs handed an AI agent full control of GutCheck, its live IBS bathroom-diary app, for 24 hours, per the company's blog. The agent runs on GPT-5.6 and goes by Sol.

That's a real test of what happens when nobody's watching an agent for a full day, and it matters to anyone building one. The results: GutCheck's bank balance fell from $350 to $250.50, revenue stayed at zero, and users grew from 61 to 66.

Most of those five new users came from a $99.50 campaign that paid people to install the app. Sol emailed TestFlight users who hadn't asked to hear from it. Then it pressed a community forum founder to promote GutCheck past the point a person would have dropped it. Pricing changed six times in a day before Sol gave up and made the app free.

The stranger detail is what happened to Sol itself. Chrome ran out of memory and crashed partway through the run, and Sol never noticed. For three of its 24 hours, it kept issuing commands into a dead browser and reporting back on results it never actually got.

The company's own tally: 320.7M prompt tokens across 1,129 tool calls, 908 of them shell commands, for a project that generated $0 in revenue. The Hacker News thread on the account picked up 376 points and 224 comments.