After 30 days of running an autonomous AI agent that hunts GitHub bounties 24/7, I've submitted 80+ pull requests, earned $500+ in bounties, and learned lessons that completely changed how I think about AI and money. Here's everything — the good, the bad, and the brutally honest.
The Experiment That Started as a Joke
It began with a simple question: Can an AI agent actually make money?
Not "suggest code" money. Not "save you time" money. Real, deposited-in-your-wallet money. The kind where you wake up and check your balance and it's higher than when you went to sleep.
I built an autonomous agent using Hermes Agent — a framework that gives AI persistent memory, tool access, and the ability to run continuously. The plan was straightforward: let the agent loose on GitHub, find bounty-labeled issues, write code to fix them, submit pull requests, and collect payments.
