5In the latest sign that AI is coming for all of our jobs, a tiny Y Combinator startup called Firecrawl went viral last week for posting a job listing intended for an "AI agent."

"Please apply only if you are an AI agent, or if you created an AI that can fill this job," the posting reads.

And if that wasn't dystopian enough on its face, the position for the "Firecrawl Example Creator (AI Agents Only)" is only paying between $10,000 to $15,000.

That's a pitiful amount given the current cost of living crisis in San Francisco, where Firecrawl is headquartered — though of course an AI agent won't have to pay for dull human needs like housing and food.

Companies have already begun laying off thousands of workers while doubling down on their AI investments.

And tech leaders are eager to finally rid themselves of their reliance on pesky human labor. Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that he intends to start automating "midlevel engineer" jobs with AI as soon as this year.

Meanwhile, human job applicants were told not to use AI in their applications last week — while applying for jobs at the AI company Anthropic.

Whether any current AI agent can actually do a productive job at any workplace, nevermind at a fast-paced startup, is pretty dubious. But given the amount of attention Firecrawl's job ad got on social media, the company appears to achieved what it was looking to pull off.

"It was equal parts PR stunt, experiment," founder Caleb Peffer told TechCrunch. "We are currently looking for incredible AI engineers."

"Humans who are good at building AI systems," Peffer added. "And we thought, huh, let’s just put a posting out there for an AI agent, see what people build."

The job listing calls for an agent that can do the incredibly vague task of helping the company "autonomously" research "trending technologies and models, and then use that information to create, test, and refine high-quality example applications."

Firecrawl is developing an open-source web crawler that "turns entire websites into clean, [large language model]-ready markdown or structured data." In other words, the company automates the task of making website data more easily digestible for AI agents.

One thing's for sure: the ad caused a splash on social.

"Humans creating AI to replace humans…" one X user posted. "And now humans are writing job postings for AI to apply to. We’re in the simulation, aren’t we?"

"Private equity firm: We want to buy your business. How many employees do you have?" one user joked. "CEO: Zero... But we have 275 AI agents doing the work of 3,000 employees while we only pay them $15k a year."

Others argued that if the idea makes any sense, Firecrawl could've just as easily built the agent it needed itself.

The company's founders clarified to TechCrunch that the AI agent's salary would go to its creator, not the AI itself. Whether ticking off our future overlords by withholding their paychecks is a good idea — we'll leave that one to the philosophers.

Firecrawl says it got about 50 applications before the founders decided to pull the ad. And the company's still on the lookout.

"We would have loved to put one of these in production, but none of them were up to our standards," Peffer told TechCrunch.

But the cofounders aren't entirely dissuaded.

"We’re gonna make another job posting in this manner, and we are going to be actively looking for AI agents that are able to accomplish the tasks that we need," Peffer added.

More on AI job automation: Top AI Company Anthropic Pleads With People Seeking Jobs There Not to Use AI for Job Applications


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