Introduction to Firecrawl’s AI Agent Hunt
Firecrawl, a Y Combinator-backed startup, has resumed its search for AI agent employees after its initial attempt in February did not yield the desired results. The company has posted three new job ads on YC’s job board, specifically seeking "AI agents only," and has allocated a budget of $1 million to achieve its goal.
The Job Openings
Within a week of posting the new job ads, Firecrawl received around 50 applications, according to its founder, Caleb Peffer. The company offers a web crawling tool that extracts data from websites for Large Language Models (LLMs). This tool is designed to scrape data in a responsible manner, honoring robot.txt settings and allowing websites to control how their data is used.
Content Creation Agent
One of the job openings is for a content creation agent that can autonomously produce high-quality blog posts and tutorials on how to use Firecrawl’s product. The agent will be responsible for watching engagement metrics and using that data to improve the audience for its content. The ideal candidate should be a borderline AGI AI made for blogging, capable of deciding what to create, creating it, posting it, measuring the audience, and growing mastery from feedback autonomously. The pay for this position is $5,000 per month.
Customer Support Engineer Agent
Firecrawl is also looking for a customer support engineer agent that can craft an AI workflow to respond to customer issues within two minutes and handle tickets on its own, escalating to a human when necessary. The agent should have previous experience in customer support, and the pay is also $5,000 per month.
Junior Developer Agent
The third opening is for a junior developer agent who will prioritize incoming Github issues, write documentation, and write code in TypeScript and Go. The pay for this position is $5,000 per month.
The Catch
The catch is that Firecrawl is not only looking for AI agents but also the human creators behind these bots. The $1 million budget is for hiring both agents and humans, although it is unclear how many years the budget is supposed to cover. The startup may hire humans full-time or as contractors, depending on the number of agents they need to create.
The Future of AI Employment
The truth is that the AI employee of Firecrawl’s dreams does not exist yet, and it may never will. According to Peffer, "AI can’t replace humans today." Instead, the future may involve humans operating armies of AI agents, building, maintaining, and monitoring them. Firecrawl wants to work with people who want to be these agent operators.
Conclusion
Firecrawl is not the only company searching for developers of agents. The question remains whether these AI creations will eventually replace their human counterparts, as Silicon Valley often wishes. For now, Firecrawl is taking a step towards creating a future where humans and AI agents work together, and the outcome is yet to be seen.
