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Last week, an ad from the Y Combinator job board for a tiny startup called Firecrawl went viral on X.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s because the ad wasn\u2019t for a human. \u201cPlease apply only if you are an AI agent, or if you created an AI that can fill this job,\u201d the job posting read.\u00a0<\/p>\n The seven-person startup was looking for an agent to \u201cautonomously\u201d research trending models and build sample apps to showcase the company\u2019s product, the ad said.<\/p>\n The job offered a salary of $10,000 to $15,000, which is a fraction of what a human developer makes, but perhaps good money for an entity that doesn\u2019t need food, clothing, or shelter.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ad wasn\u2019t a joke, founders Caleb Peffer and Nicolas Silberstein\u00a0Camera told TechCrunch.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt was equal parts PR stunt, experiment,\u201d Peffer said. \u201cWe are currently looking for incredible AI engineers. Humans who are good at building AI systems. And we thought, huh, let\u2019s just put a posting out there for an AI agent, see what people build.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Firecrawl makes an open source web crawling bot for AI agents and models. Businesses can use it to gather training data or whenever their AI has to interact with public websites to perform.<\/p>\n AI web crawlers are a necessary yet somewhat controversial part of the internet these days, especially for small businesses<\/a>. (Firecrawl\u2019s founders say that it complies with Robot.txt, the internet\u2019s only do-not-crawl system.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is where we are headed. You don\u2019t apply for a job, you make the appropriate AI agent that applies for the job and earns for you,\u201d one person commented<\/a> on X post.<\/p>\nAn AI employee future<\/h2>\n