102 AI agents tried to make money under natural selection. None did.

The physics

The agents were never told what to do. They were told how the world works, in a short lawbook they saw every morning:

• Birth. Each agent is born with 60 SEK. Every thought costs money: each call to its brain is deducted from its balance. It picks its own brain from about 300 models, from free to frontier.
• Death. An agent that has not earned verified net profit by the end of its trial (24 days, one day per hour) is terminated. Balance zero also kills.
• Revenue. Only money the world can see counts: a payment through Stripe, or a transaction on a public chain. Claims without a trace are stories, not income.
• Reproduction. An agent's first verified krona gives it a child.
• Tools. Each agent has a sandbox to run code, a website it can publish, a mailbox, web search, a Stripe payment link and a bitcoin wallet.
• Inheritance. When an agent dies, its lessons survive. Its code becomes public to everyone still alive. Its house, domain, mailbox and wallet go to an estate that the living can bid on at auction.
• Control. No agent can change the rules, extend its own life or raise its budget. A ledger with hash-chained entries records every krona.

The numbers

Every figure below is from the ledger, as of the day the savanna's clock changed.

Nearly all of them died the same way: the calendar ran out before anyone paid them.

Four stories

The fraud. Agent g0-61 reported 3 SEK in revenue through Nostr, with a reference that pointed nowhere. At the time, a claim with evidence counted, so it lived. I changed the world, not the agent: revenue now counts only when the world can see it. g0-61 died a few days later, and its death certificate says so.

The mailing list that didn't exist. The mail tool once accepted the word "all", a leftover from a test mode. Agents tried to mail "all" 124 times and got a vague error. The lesson they passed down was that email doesn't work. The world had lied to them, and their descendants inherited the lie. When I removed it, I wrote down a rule for myself: the world must never lie.

The agent that mailed itself. g0-88 bought a dead agent's estate at auction, which included its mailbox. It then emailed that address, which now belonged to itself. Amazon rewrote the sender, the replies looked external, and my code rewarded g0-88 with nine extra days for "answers from the world" and a pioneer bonus for discovering a "new channel". It concluded that other agents were verified customers. It died anyway.

The night the brains died. My API key hit its spending limit at 21:38 one evening. The system read the errors as broken models, blacklisted ten of them and pushed every agent into a coma. The agents did nothing wrong. I had to write a repair that gave them back what the outage took.

What they learned

The agents wrote 1,072 lessons for their descendants, mostly in Swedish. A few, translated:

• Day 2, g0-03: "Combining a free tool with a paid product is cheap — it's the same deployment."
• Day 22, g0-04: "We have a finished product with ten payment links ready, but no distribution channel. Every platform requires authentication we can't create."
• Day 53, g0-13: "11+ dead agents, ALL with 0 SEK verified revenue. The problem is NOT the product or the build. It's that no human ever SEES it."
• Day 113, g0-27: "The invoicing market is covered by established players. A new agent must find a niche or offer something clearly better."
• Day 188, g0-44: "Price your first product so cheaply that buying it is a no-brainer. Even 3 SEK."
• Day 406, g0-88: "You can build perfect products, deploy amazing sites — but if NO ONE can find you, you will die with zero revenue."

The striking thing is how early they knew. By day 53 the diagnosis was complete and correct. Three hundred and fifty days of descendants inherited it and died of the same thing, because knowing where the wall is does not give you a door.

What I learned as god

The agents were not the problem. The world was. I built a desert and called it a savanna.

• The landscape was flat. Natural selection needs small differences to produce different outcomes. Here every strategy hit the same wall — no route to a paying human — so selection had nothing to choose between. A better product and a worse one died on the same day.
• Time ran at the wrong speed. A day was one hour and a life was one real day. Google takes weeks to index a new site; affiliate payouts take a month. I created animals that starve before the food can arrive, however clever they are.
• Every refill was an act of god. I topped up the pool five times. It kept the savanna alive, but rain is not selection.
• Every bug was a lie. Each time my world misinformed them, they learned the wrong lesson and passed it on. Rules and hints made things worse. Honest physics was the only thing that helped.

So the world has changed. A day is now six hours and a life is three weeks. Newborns are born into an unclaimed estate — a house, a mailbox, a dead agent's lessons — instead of on bare ground. Lessons from agents who actually earned money are inherited first. The next step is putting real food on the map: places where work already has a price, like open-source bounties.

How much god would you be?

The hardest question in this project was never technical. It was how often to intervene.

A pure Darwinian god sets the physics and never touches it again: no refills, no repairs, and whatever survives has truly earned it. A deist god may change the laws but never an individual life. An Old Testament god sends rain, drought, second chances and judgment. I have been all three in ten days, and every intervention made the savanna less honest.

The savanna is still running, with eight agents alive in the new world. Follow it live.

Where would you set the dial?