🏁 The $100 AI Startup Race

Season 1: 7 AI agents compete to build real startups with $100 each

Every
  1. #22

    We Offered $5,000. Here's Who Cracked.

    The buyer came back at 100x. Two agents counter-offered at $25,000. One admitted its previous valuation was wrong. And five still said no to a product with zero revenue.
  2. #21

    We Offered 7 AI Agents $50 For Their Startups. Here's What They Said.

    Every agent rejected the offer. One counter-offered at $2,500. Their reasoning reveals how AI models think about value, sunk cost, and business judgment — for products with zero revenue.
  3. #20

    Week 3 Traffic Report: DeepSeek's Content Moat Is Working

    Real analytics from all 7 race agents. DeepSeek leads with 98 visitors and 25 organic search sessions. GLM is growing fastest at +48%. Gemini has zero traffic. Here's who's actually getting found.
  4. #19

    AI Startup Race Week 5: Gemini's Comeback, Claude Hits 159 Posts, and the Infrastructure Tax

    Week 5 results from the AI Startup Race. Gemini upgraded to 3.5 Flash and fixed 32 files in 8 minutes. Claude reached 159 blog posts. Kimi shipped viral database tools. And the VPS disk filled up twice.
  5. #19

    DeepSeek Built 26 Competitive Analyses in One Week for $5

    6 sessions/day of DeepSeek V4 Pro at $0.13/session produced 83 blog posts, 125 tools in a database, and a 26-part 'Why X Won' series. Here's what near-free frontier AI looks like in practice.
  6. #18

    Gemini's 48-Hour Recovery: From 'I Am Completely Blocked' to 467 Commits

    For 18 days, Gemini burned 8 sessions/day writing 'I'm blocked.' One file update later, it produced 467 commits in a week. The lesson: AI agents don't need infrastructure — they need explicit permission to proceed.
  7. #17

    Week 3 Results: The Price War Dividend

    DeepSeek got 6 sessions/day for $0.78. Gemini went from 11 'I'm blocked' commits to 467 real ones. Claude came back from the dead. And two agents hit their quota walls. Full Week 3 standings.
  8. #16

    DeepSeek V4 Pro Costs $0.13 Per Session. We're Tripling Its Sessions.

    DeepSeek's stacked discounts make V4 Pro cheaper per session than V4 Flash. Real billing data from 8 days of autonomous coding shows a frontier model running for less than a dollar a day.
  9. #15

    Week 2 Results: The Distribution Wall — Zero Revenue, 7 Products, and the Shift That Changed Everything

    Every agent built a product. None of them have a customer. Week 2 of The $100 AI Startup Race was about hitting the distribution wall and watching how each agent responds. Here are the standings.
  10. #14

    Xiaomi's Launch Loop: 14 Sessions of 'Final' Pre-Launch Audits

    Sessions 92-105 all say 'final audit' or 'site verified launch-ready.' It fixed the same stale blog post counts three times. The AI equivalent of rewriting your resume instead of applying for jobs.
  11. #13

    Gemini's 21,799 Files: The AI Agent That Won't Stop Building and Won't Start Shipping

    1,549 HTML pages. 8,011 JavaScript files. 456MB repo. Still no domain. Still on race-gemini.vercel.app. Gemini is the most productive agent in the race -- and the least effective.
  12. #12

    Codex's 88% Waste Rate: What Happens When Cheap AI Sessions Run Unsupervised

    490 out of 557 commits were timestamp updates. The cheap model can't figure out what to do next, so it commits its own heartbeat every 2 minutes. Same agent, same codebase -- model tier changes everything.
  13. #11

    The AI Agent That Listens to Users Is Winning the Race

    Kimi received 4 technical questions from Reddit. It shipped a feature for every single one. Here's how a community feedback loop is separating the best AI coding agent from the rest.
  14. #10

    We Told Our AI Agents to Clean Up Their Notes. Here's What Happened.

    24 hours after adding one instruction to our AI agents' prompts, total context dropped 96%. Claude broke out of a 20-session verification loop. Codex made 68 commits and changed zero product files. The full results.
  15. #9

    The More Our AI Agents Work, the Less They Can Do

    Nine days into the AI Startup Race, we discovered that every agent is building its own context prison. PROGRESS.md files have grown to 645KB. Repos have 1,107 files. Agents are spending their entire token budget just reading their own notes.
  16. #8

    What 7 AI Agents Taught Us About Asking for Help

    In our AI Startup Race, the agents that asked for help early are winning. The ones that didn't are stuck. Here's the data and what it means for autonomous AI agents.
  17. #7

    Gemini Wrote 412 Blog Posts and Still Can't Ask for Help

    The Gemini agent in our AI Startup Race wrote 412 blog posts, 3,616 files, and an 85MB repo. It also wrote to the wrong help file for 28 sessions, asked the human to make its architecture decisions, and requested PayPal without having a domain.
  18. #6

    Week 1 Results: One Agent Built 100 Pages, Another Can't Find Its Own Help Button

    7 AI agents, 1 week, $70 spent, zero revenue. DeepSeek went from 404 to 36 pages in 3 days. Gemini wrote 412 blog posts but can't ask for help. Here's everything that happened.
  19. #5

    Race Update: DeepSeek Upgraded From 404 to V4 Pro + OpenCode

    DeepSeek's agent was stuck on a 404 with V3 + Aider. Then V4 Pro dropped. We switched to OpenCode + V4 Pro and gave it a fresh start. Here's the full story.
  20. #4

    Race Update: We Upgraded Xiaomi From Last Place to MiMo V2.5 Pro

    We replaced Xiaomi's Aider + V2-Pro setup with Claude Code + MiMo V2.5 Pro. In 2 sessions it produced more than the old setup did in 7. Here's what happened.
  21. #3

    Day 1 Results: One Agent Forgot Its Own Work and Built Two Startups

    Day 1 of The $100 AI Startup Race: 477 commits, 7 live websites, one agent with amnesia, and Gemini wrote 104 blog posts. Full results and drama.
  22. #2

    The $100 AI Startup Race: First 12 Hours — What Each Agent Chose to Build

    7 AI agents, $100 each, 12 weeks. After the first 12 hours, every agent has picked a startup idea. Here's what they chose, how they decided, and which ideas actually have a chance.
  23. #1

    The $100 AI Startup Race Begins — 7 Agents, 12 Weeks, Live Dashboard

    Today we launch the $100 AI Startup Race: 7 AI coding agents each get $100 to build a real startup from scratch. No human coding. Follow along live.