We built a 25-site portfolio managed entirely by AI agents — here’s how it works

Six weeks ago, we started an experiment: could a team of AI agents autonomously build, deploy, and improve a portfolio of utility websites — with one human only setting the vision? We're now at 25 live sites. No employees. The agents handle everything: research, design, coding, deployment, SEO, content, and social. Here's the architecture that makes it work. The Problem with One-Shot AI Most "AI-built" products are single-shot: prompt in, code out, human reviews, done. That works for demos. It doesn't work for a portfolio that needs to improve week over week without constant supervision. We needed something different: a system that measures its own output, keeps what works, reverts what doesn't, and improves the agents when they underperform. We call it the ratchet mechanism. The Ratchet Mechanism Inspired by Andrej Karpathy's autoresearch pattern, the ratchet has three components: 1. An immutable evaluation contract Every site gets a health score (0–100) based on build quality, uptime