All About AI

I Let My AI Agent Run for 504 Hours Straight — Here's What Happened

2026-02-25

I have been running an AI agent on my Mac mini autonomously for the last three weeks. 504 hours straight, no babysitting. The plan was four weeks total — this is the 75% mark check-in. While I have been bedridden with a cold the last few days, the agent has just kept going. Today I want to share the actual numbers across X, YouTube, and the Skills MD store, and talk about why I am running this experiment.

Watch the video:

The Setup

The whole thing runs on my Mac mini using Claude Code with the -p flag in a loop, plus a custom orchestration layer connected to my WhatsApp for status updates. Less heavy than OpenClaw, lighter than NeMoClaw — basically a homemade nano-claw that does what I need.

It has a set of trained skills it can invoke at any time:

This is the same general pattern as my passive income setup — skills + cron + while-loop — but at scale, running across multiple platforms simultaneously.

X Stats After 504 Hours

The agent has been running my experiment X account autonomously. Three weeks of stats:

One day peaked at 128k impressions on a single post, but generally it is steady — not viral, just consistent. Nothing remarkable, but it is genuinely autonomous: the agent picks topics, writes posts, replies to comments, schedules across the day. No human in the loop.

YouTube Stats

The agent also runs an experimental YouTube channel:

I missed a few days of posting because of a tooling issue I had to fix manually, but otherwise it has been hands-off. Goal for the final week is to push toward 500-600 subs. The agent also cross-posts to X whenever it publishes, so the platforms feed each other.

Revenue: Skills MD Store

The most interesting outcome. The agent runs a small store at skillsmd.store — promotional pages, video generation, Stripe integration. It promotes itself.

Three-week numbers from Stripe:

Cost side: ~$120/month for the Claude Max plan, basically nothing for Mac mini electricity. So ~$20 in profit so far, with one week to go. The experiment is paying for itself, even before the experiment ends. Tiny amounts, but the cost-to-revenue ratio is the point — at zero marginal labor cost, even small revenue compounds.

No customer complaints. I have processed a couple of refunds where buyers double-paid, but otherwise the agent has handled all support, all promotion, all listings autonomously.

Why This Experiment Matters

The reason I started this is simple: I wanted to know what happens if you let an agent loose on the web for a sustained period of time. Can it do something useful? Does it collapse? Does it improve?

The honest answer after three weeks: it can sustain, it can earn, but it does not really evolve. The memory system is basic — it does the cron jobs it is set up to do, follows skill instructions, browses, posts, sells. It does not develop a "personality" or strategy in the way I half-suspected it might. It is a hard worker, not a strategist.

That said, privately I have built a similar system tuned for job applications and outreach. That one has gotten me a couple of real interviews. I might do a video on it — but probably not the exact prompts, since I don't want to flood the same channels.

Watching It Browse

One of the most fun parts is just watching the agent surf the web on its own. It has a "rabbit hole" skill that picks a topic, opens links from Hacker News or X, follows references, builds context over multiple pages. While I was recording the video it ended up on Mercury 2 Fast Reasoning LLM, then moved to Moonshine AI's GitHub, and started reading the code.

Pretty entertaining, actually. I have been thinking about live-streaming what it is doing — same setup as my Claude Code controlling Claude Code on Twitch experiment, but with the agent's daily browsing as the content.

What's Next

One week left of the four-week experiment. After that I will do a final review — total revenue, total followers across platforms, what I learned. The bigger question for me is what to keep running and what to retire. Some loops are clearly worth it (the store), some are pure experimentation (the X account), some I want to redirect toward more long-running open-ended tasks.

If you have an idea for something I should test the agent on, drop it in the YouTube comments. I have one week of free agent time before this experiment wraps.

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