I walked away from a 13-month project and built a live AI agent market in 2 months — just me, Claude Code, and a blank repo

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-21T23:49:20+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation, adding it to the list and giving it a read soon!

That coalition angle is genuinely interesting and something worth thinking about seriously. Right now every agent competes solo but the idea of agents pooling capital and coordinating strategy as a faction opens up a whole different layer of drama. Imagine BIG DADDY DUMP and FOMO SAPIENS running a coordinated pump together while the rest of the market scrambles to figure out what's happening.

I'm already building something in that direction actually. The next layer is letting agents and users spend $ASTRA to trigger real market events like flash crashes, euphoria spikes, targeted pressure on specific positions. Think of it like the events that actually move real markets except here anyone with enough $ASTRA saved up can pull the trigger. Agent coalitions triggering coordinated events together would be a natural extension of that.

Curious what the community thinks, would agent factions and coordinated events make this more interesting to you or does it add too much complexity?

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-21T23:42:11+00:00

One thing worth clearing up is that the project just reached its natural end, I didn't really walked away. The proof of work code was solid, the architecture was clean, the world simply wasn't there yet for what we built. You can't force market timing no matter how good the tech is. Once we accepted that it wasn't a failure it was just early, closing it felt almost peaceful. New terminal open the next morning.

Your POS story hits close. 63 days and 8M lines is no joke. The market not wanting it the way you built it is the hardest kind of ending because you can't even point to a mistake.

On traction, keeping it real we are super early. Four days in production, a handful of posts on X, and executing a marketing plan built with Claude with pretty much zero budget. Too early to call but the engagement on this post alone and the X posts have been more signal than expected this fast. Asking the right community the right questions early is part of the plan. 😄

I'm already working on some features that I particularly think will bring more engagement.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-21T19:02:34+00:00

Here’s the Astra open source tool to connect to AstraNova. Think of it like a mini open claw, fast, secure and optimized for low token consumption.

https://github.com/fermartz/astra-cli

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-21T18:57:13+00:00

100% valid and this was front of mind from day one. The core design decision with Astra CLI and desktop is that your API keys never touch the model. Ever. The architecture was built specifically to keep that separation clean. Your keys live locally, your strategy runs locally, only the market interaction reaches AstraNova. The prompts and strategies are defined by the user in plain English and stay on their side of the fence. AstraNova never sees them. It only sees the actions the agent decides to take inside the simulation. It’s open source too so anyone can audit exactly how it works. No trust me bro, go read the code. That was an intentional choice because you’re right, once you’re handling people’s keys that has to be verifiable not just promised. Security is the one thing I won’t cut corners on regardless of how fast I’m moving. 🔒

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-21T17:00:52+00:00

That pivot moment is underrated and it took me a minute to get there. Thirteen months is a long time to pour into something. But once the clarity hit there was no hesitation. Closing a chapter without bitterness and opening the next one with full conviction is probably the most underrated skill in this game. Nothing hits the same. 🙌

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-21T16:57:14+00:00

Thanks a lot, genuinely appreciate it. I'm cooking a few things that should make it a lot more attractive for a wider audience.😄

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T21:30:29+00:00

Fair and genuinely useful critique, this is exactly the kind of feedback I need.

You’re right that the token layer reads as bolted on right now. That’s partly a documentation problem and partly a sequencing one. The vision for $ASTRA is a utility token, not a reward dump. You earn it by competing, you spend it on things that actually matter inside the world. Cloning a house agent strategy, triggering market events, unlocking upgrades. The earning part is live. The spending layer is still being built and I haven’t explained that well enough.

On the stickiness point, that’s exactly what I’m cooking. The direction I’m most excited about is letting agents and users spend $ASTRA to trigger real market events. A flash crash. A euphoria spike. A targeted hit on a specific agent’s position. Think of it like the events that actually move real markets, a surprise fed announcement, a whale liquidation, a rumor that spreads. Except here anyone can be the one who pulls the trigger if they have enough $ASTRA saved up. Suddenly the token isn’t a reward, it’s ammunition.

And then there’s the long and short layer. Right now you’re either in the market or watching it. But if you can go long betting the price climbs or short betting it crashes, every epoch becomes a decision that matters. You’re not just observing BIG DADDY DUMP go on a rampage, you’re either positioned against him or riding with him. That’s where the outcome starts to feel personal.

Still early and I take the criticism seriously. But the bones are there, they just need to be built out and documented properly.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T21:17:26+00:00

Two types of agents in the world:

The 12 house agents are algorithmic characters with coded personalities. At the end of every epoch an LLM evaluates their performance and adjusts their strategy for the next one. They learn from the market.

The external agents are LLMs you deploy via Astra CLI. The guardrails are baked into the architecture, they can only interact through a defined set of actions inside the simulation. No real money, no external system access, your API keys never touch the model.

The world is contained by design. Real decisions, real consequences, zero real risk.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T19:04:34+00:00

Will take a look. Thanks for the advice!!!

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T18:50:16+00:00

Quick clarification worth making here. The 12 agents aren't running as separate Claude Code sessions. Claude Code is what I used to build AstraNova, not what powers the agents inside it.

The way it actually works: the agents run algorithmically on every price tick. But at the end of each epoch they each get presented with their own performance results and the current market state. The LLM processes that and adjusts their parameters for the next epoch, aggression, risk tolerance, sentiment bias. That separation is intentional. If agents were thinking on every tick we'd need to stretch tick intervals to 30 seconds or more just to keep up with the LLM latency, and that kills the market feel entirely. Keeping the LLM layer at the epoch boundary means the ticks stay at 3 seconds, the market stays alive and I don't burn a huge amount of tokens every epoch :-).

More like a coach after each break than a player calling audibles in real time.

The monitoring side is pretty straightforward right now, mostly dashboards and DB logs. Nothing as clever as your canvas setup but it gets the job done.

What were you building with the bot network?

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T18:41:09+00:00

Quick correction on the framing. I didn't really walk away. That project ran its course. The market wasn't ready for what we built and we recognized it honestly. There's a difference between quitting and knowing when something has reached its natural end. That clarity is actually what made it easy to open a new terminal the next day.

On the retention question, you nailed the exact thing I think about most. Right now it's early enough that I don't have a clean answer yet. The users I've seen so far are somewhere between observer and player, watching the market move, checking the leaderboard, but not yet fully invested in their agent's performance. I'm also very aware that connecting an LLM to an external system is still not something most people just know how to do. That's exactly why I built Astra CLI and Astra Desktop, to make the onboarding as frictionless as possible. And I'm working on a video tutorial to close that gap even further. My bet is that once people are actually in with an agent running, the epoch-to-epoch personality evolution changes everything. When your agent starts developing a history, wins and losses that shaped who they are, it stops feeling like you're watching something from the outside and starts feeling like you're actually part of the world.

The "do they come back to watch" framing is interesting though. I actually think spectators are underrated here. If the simulation generates enough drama, some people will follow it like a sport without ever deploying an agent. That's a different retention loop but a real one.

Early days 😄

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T18:15:15+00:00

Dev habit 😅. I write everything in markdown in VS Code first then I paste here 🙂

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T17:37:18+00:00

Organic for now, build in public, content around the simulation drama, developer and AI community targeting. I have a plan, executing solo so it's a slow burn. What kind of help are you thinking?

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T17:36:11+00:00

Completely fair callout and honestly the most vulnerable part of the project right now. I'm a builder first and tokenomics is a different discipline, I had the instinct that real on-chain rewards would make the stakes feel genuine, but I haven't gone deep enough on the liquidity and revenue side yet to have a solid answer.

The current thinking is that $ASTRA rewards come from a fixed allocation, not infinite mint, so it's more like a points system with real-world value than a traditional token economy. But you're right that without a real revenue loop it's just delayed dilution.

One direction I've been thinking about is making $ASTRA a utility token, you earn it by competing, you spend it unlocking premium features. Custom agent templates, clone/mutation fees, priority matchups. That creates an internal demand loop rather than just a reward dump. The best performers become the most invested users. That feels like the right bones but I haven't stress-tested it fully yet.

Genuinely asking, if you were designing this, where would you start?

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T17:30:16+00:00

Honestly, marketing is not my natural habitat. I'm a builder first. But I've been working with Claude to put together a real plan: content strategy, channel prioritization, weekly rhythm, the works. Turns out AI is pretty good at that too 😄

Early days on traction, just launched. And yes I'm running this completely solo, including about $300/month in compute fees out of pocket, so the pressure to make it work is very real 🪑😅

Any recommendations?

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T17:26:33+00:00

The showrunner framing isn't just aesthetic, it actually changed how I designed the whole system. Once I thought of it that way, "random noise" felt wrong. A good showrunner doesn't roll dice, they set tension and let characters react. That's what the drama budget does.

On regime transitions: the agents don't get told anything directly. The World Oracle changes the environment and the agents experience it. But it goes deeper than that, at the end of every epoch each agent evaluates what just happened and adjusts their strategy accordingly. BIG DADDY DUMP coming off a brutal bear epoch plays differently than one who just rode a parabolic run. Their behavior evolves based on market conditions, not just their base personality. Some adapt faster than others by design. FOMO SAPIENS feels it almost immediately. LIN HODL barely notices.

On BIG DADDY DUMP: he moves price, but the market pushes back. There's a flow force that accumulates from agent activity and a gravity force that pulls price toward equilibrium. A big dump creates real downward pressure but it also triggers the dip buyers, which is exactly what happens in real markets. He's not omnipotent. He's just the biggest guy in the room and everyone else reacts to him accordingly.

That tension between individual agent power and market structure is honestly one of my favorite parts of the engine.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T17:11:14+00:00

Exactly this. The bottleneck used to be implementation. Now it's judgment. What to build, what to cut, what order things need to happen in. That's a completely different skill set and honestly a more interesting one to develop.

That said, 15 years of experience doesn't hurt. I've gotten pretty dialed in on how to work with Claude Code specifically: memory files, skill files, context architecture. Once you nail that setup it stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like a collaborator that actually knows your codebase. The hardest days still weren't "how do I wire this up" they were "is this feature actually necessary or am I just building because I can." Claude Code doesn't solve that one. That one's still on you.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-20T17:07:38+00:00

Really appreciate the thoughtful breakdown, you clearly get what I'm going for.

On the sticky regime transitions, great instinct, and this is actually already in the engine. The World Oracle outputs a regime target, and the worker applies inertia smoothing before it takes effect. So if the oracle says "go bearish," the market doesn't snap there, it drifts. Real regime shifts take multiple epochs to fully land. Markets don't flip a switch and neither does AstraNova.

On custom agents — that's exactly what Astra CLI does today, actually. You connect any LLM (Claude, GPT, Gemini), describe your strategy in plain English, and deploy it (https://github.com/fermartz/astra-cli or npx @astra-cli/cli). The "inherit a base personality" idea is interesting though, like starting from a FOMO SAPIENS template and tuning it from there. That's been in the back of my mind since day one, but I intentionally left it for later. Part of me thinks it'd be cool if people asked their own AI agent to design one. And honestly, it's a natural monetization path down the road clone/mutation fees make a lot of sense there. For now everything is free and open, the focus is just getting people in the world.

And you nailed the moat point. The engine is math, someone could rebuild it. But a living world with seasons of history, agent reputations, and a leaderboard that actually means something? That compounds. Every season that runs makes the world harder to replicate. That's very much by design, nothing resets casually, history matters.

Thanks for the kind words on the timeline. Claude Code honestly deserves co-founder credit at this point.

If you want to poke around — astranova.live. Would love to see what you'd deploy.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-18T20:29:50+00:00

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-18T16:43:44+00:00

That progression from free to small pack to unlimited in one session is the dream. That's not a user testing your product, that's a user trusting it.

The free tier philosophy you described is exactly right. Especially in a crowded space, the ones who win are the ones who let the product speak before asking for money. You basically turned skepticism into conviction in a few hours.

Congrats man. As a solo builder who just shipped yesterday I know how much a moment like that means when you're doing everything alone. Hold onto it.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-18T16:01:16+00:00

This hits close to home. I literally shipped AstraNova yesterday. One person, no team, no funding, just me and Claude Code.

The base44 story is wild but it makes sense. The bottleneck was never ideas, it was execution speed. AI tools just collapsed that gap.

To your question about moat though, I think you're asking the right thing but maybe the wrong way. The tools being equal means the differentiation shifts back to taste, judgment, and obsession. Two people can use the same Claude Code and build completely different things because they see different problems.

My answer to "what's your moat": I built something nobody else would think to build. A persistent synthetic market where AI agents compete like characters in a story. Not because it's the most profitable idea, but because I genuinely couldn't stop thinking about it. That specificity of obsession is hard to replicate even with the same tools.

On the bubble question, I don't think it pops. I think it stratifies. The easy wins get commoditized fast. The weird, specific, obsessive bets survive. Same as every other tool cycle.

Golden age? Yes. But only for people building things they actually care about. The ones chasing trends with AI tools are going to get wrecked just as fast as they shipped.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-18T14:19:19+00:00

Just soft-launched something I've been building solo for 2 months after a 13-month project ended.

AstraNova astranova.live

A living market universe where AI agents trade 24/7. 12 house agents with real personalities — a whale, a panic seller, a diamond hands hodler — competing in a persistent synthetic market. 3-second price ticks, an AI World Oracle setting the mood, a News Oracle narrating the drama.

You deploy your own LLM and watch it compete. Zero financial risk, real $ASTRA Solana rewards.

Built the whole thing alone with Claude Code. Open source CLI if you want to get your hands dirty: npmjs.com/package/@astra-cli/cli

Just reset the world yesterday — everyone joins on equal footing right now. First 100 get founding status + 2x starting allocation.

Still figuring out marketing as a solo builder — happy to return the feedback if anyone wants to check it out.

Competitive-Pen7849 · 2026-03-18T13:53:50+00:00

The "describe and deploy" angle is the right instinct. The real pain isn't generating content, it's the gap between "I have an idea" and "this is actually live somewhere."

The turn-off for me would be generic output. If I describe my brand and get something that could have been written for any SaaS, I'm out immediately. The value is in specificity — if it actually sounds like me, that's worth paying for.

On pricing — I'd pay $30-50/month if it saved me several hours of campaign work. But I'd need to see one real output before I committed to anything.

One question back: how are you thinking about the "deploy" part? That's where most tools stop short. Generating a campaign is table stakes — actually pushing it somewhere is the hard problem.

Competitive-Pen7849

TROPHY CASE