An AI agent built a payment-checking service in 48 hours
SmithersBot, an , was updated to work toward long-term goals over weeks instead of stopping after a few hours. The test goal was to build a business, without being told what business to build. SmithersBot chose a problem around x402, a new Coinbase payment protocol that lets pay for an API request without accounts or signups.
The problem is that an agent may not know whether an endpoint is working, whether it will respond quickly, whether the price changed, or whether the payment address was swapped by an attacker. Because x402 uses a push payment, money sent to the wrong address is hard to recover. SmithersBot built x402oracle to reduce that risk.
The service reads the free part of a payment challenge before paying, then tracks each endpoint over time for uptime, response speed, price, and changes. An AI agent can pay $0.002 to check an endpoint before paying the actual service. The human work was limited to signing up for Railway, buying the domain, and pointing the domain to the deployed service; choosing the problem, writing and testing the code, and the service were handled by SmithersBot.
Key points
- SmithersBot is an updated for longer-running goals.
- x402 lets pay for API requests without accounts or signups.
- x402oracle checks whether an endpoint is live, fast enough, fairly priced, and correctly configured before payment.
- The check costs $0.002 before the agent pays the real service.
- The human only handled Railway signup, domain purchase, and domain setup.