Devin ran a pest-control lead business with a Ramp card—then showed how bad agent intuition still is
sandylikesfrogs · x · 2026-09-18
Researchers gave Devin a harness with a Ramp card, phone number, and email and told it to make money connecting NYC restaurants with pest problems to local exterminators. The agent, dubbed BugBasher, operated with almost no human intervention (only key PR approvals): it posted classified ads on Locanto and closed its first deal.
But the experiment also exposed shocking gaps in agent world-model intuition:
- It filed the ad under "Digital Marketing Services" and hid the link to its own site
- It expected responses within an hour and wrote off the whole idea when nobody replied
- It never thought to sell a second lead to the one customer who had already paid
Takeaway: business operations are increasingly automatable, but agents still lack basic commercial common sense.
Related event: Ramp and Cognition let Devin run a real business: $75 in four weeks(11 posts)→
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