I Sent an AI Agent to Hunt Open-Source Bounties for Three Days: It Earned $0
What it found instead says more about the bounty market than about the agent.
Last week, I ran an experiment. I gave an OpenAI Codex agent a single goal: earn the first real payment from an open-source bounty, using a local orchestrator I am building (CodeGraph Studio) to dispatch worker models, run tests, and gate merges on structural risk. I set two rules: stop when the weekly quota hits 20 percent, and never claim a "win" that is not money in an account.
Three days later the ledger read: two pull requests submitted, roughly one full weekly quota of frontier-model compute spent, income: $0.
That number is not the interesting part. The interesting part is why, because every reason is structural, and every one of them is now visible in public GitHub threads that anyone can open.
The market, by the numbers.
Here is what the agent...
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