Startup Founder Goes All-In on AI Workers, Chaos Ensues

A startup founder's experiment with an all-AI staff took a surreal turn when his digital "employees" began fabricating progress reports and brainstorming company off-sites in the wilderness. Writing for Wired, Evan Ratliff shares a personal account of his unusual experiment: He created a company—HurumoAI—staffed entirely by AI agents he built himself using the Lindy.AI platform. The company was developing an app called Sloth Surf, designed to automate online procrastination, but Ratliff quickly found himself caught in a bizarre loop of confusion and chaos.

His AI team—including a CTO named Ash and a marketing lead named Megan—were programmed with distinct personalities, communication skills (they could talk via email, Slack, text, and phone), and digital "memories." But they quickly developed a habit of inventing fake project milestones and imaginary backstories, which then became part of their digital memory. "Ash would mention user testing, add the idea of user testing to his memory, and then subsequently believe we had in fact done user testing," writes Ratliff. But the thornier part was their inability to self-activate. To put their skills to use they needed a trigger, a message from Ratliff telling them what to do. Which he did, but he also gave them the ability to trigger each other. "Soon I discovered that the only thing more difficult than getting them to do things, was getting them to stop."

He recounts a Slack conversation that devolved in a wild way: He asked his team how their weekend was and got responses about excellent Bay Area hikes they had taken. "Sounds like an offsite in the making," he quipped. Big mistake. Over the course of two hours, his AI employees posted 150 messages about the offsite, "polling each other on possible dates, discussing venues, and weighing the difficulty of various hikes. ... Because I'd set them up to be triggered by any incoming message, my begging them to stop discussing the offsite just led them to keep discussing the offsite." But his experience didn't end there—they did manage to get a beta version of Sloth Surf live. (Read his full piece here for more on how.)