GoKawiilI tried to make Claude make me money on open-source bounties. Here's the data from 60 fresh issues.
A few days ago a tweet from @chatgpt21 went around showing an AI coding agent that ran unsupervised for 22 hours, found a bounty on its own, shipped a PR, and got paid $16.88. 22M tokens spent, a real first dollar collected. The thread was triumphant: "the loop works."
I wanted to see if I could replicate it on a $20 token budget with Claude as the agent. I picked the closest public analog to what the tweet described: Algora, the open-source bounty platform where maintainers attach a dollar amount to a GitHub issue and the first acceptable PR gets the money.
Forty-eight hours later I have $0 and some data that I think is more interesting than a win would have been.
The setup
The plan, on paper, was simple:
Discover open bounties via the public Algora board / GitHub label search
Pick a small, scoped issue in TS / Python / Go (something a human reviewer could sanity-check)
Let Claude clone the repo, attempt the fix, run tests
Human-in-the-loop review of the diff before pushing a PR
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