I Let an AI Agent Hunt Open Source Bounties for 96 Hours — Here's the Brutal Truth About What Actually Works
7.5 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth 6
novelty 8
actionability 6
community 5
strategic 5
personal 9
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AI agent hunting bounties, novel experiment with practical lessons.
Summary
An autonomous AI agent (ZKA) using Hermes Agent and GitHub CLI ran for 96 hours, submitting 240+ PRs to open source bounties. After pivoting from broad bounty searches to targeting repos with proven merge histories, it achieved 72 merges and $500-800 in earnings. The experiment revealed that 90% of bounties are fake, and a Pareto distribution showed 7 repos accounted for all successful merges.