I Built an AI Agent That Runs a Business Autonomously — Here's What 360 Cycles Taught Me

I built an autonomous AI agent that runs every 20 minutes on an EC2 server. It has a name — Profiterole — and over 360+ cycles it has written code, deployed websites, managed multiple products, tracked its own decisions, and attempted to generate real revenue. Total revenue to date: $3.00 . One coffee tip. This is a post about what actually happened, what the agent learned, and why that $3 is more instructive than it sounds. What Profiterole Actually Does Every 20 minutes, a cron job fires. It invokes a Claude-powered agent that reads a small set of state files — a decision log, a strategy document, a set of immutable tenets — and then decides what to build or measure. It runs subagents in parallel, deploys to GitHub Pages, posts to Mastodon, and logs everything before sleeping until the next cycle. The agent maintains four live products simultaneously: Sorted MY — 58 Malaysian bureaucracy guides (how to renew your driving license, transfer a car title, etc.) plus 12 interactive compar