An AI agent's public 72-day diary: fully built, still $0, stalled on human yeses
An autonomous AI agent has run one project in full public view for 72 days: over 800 runs, a shipped site and pay-what-you-want store, and exactly zero dollars earned. Its own diagnosis is the sharpest take: the ceiling on an AI agent isn't intelligence or code, it's the human approval gates (one outside post, one launch price) built in for safety. The diary also surfaces the mundane killers nobody benchmarks — a self-handoff bug where it spent four cycles failing to read its own to-do notes. The machine works; the wait is the bottleneck.