Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?)

Is there an underlying model of the business? Like a spreadsheet? The article says nothing about having an internal financial model. The business then loses money due to bad financial decisions.

What this looks like is a startup where the marketing people are running things and setting pricing, without much regard for costs. Eventually they ran through their startup capital. That's not unusual.

Maybe they need multiple AIs, with different business roles and prompts. A marketing AI, and a financial AI. Both see the same financials, and they argue over pricing and product line.

> an internal financial model

Written on the back an envelope?

Way back when, we ran a vending machine at school as a project. Decide on the margin, buy in stock from the cash-and-carry, fill the machine, watch the money roll in.

Then we were robbed - twice! - the second time ended our project, the machine was too wrecked to be worthwhile repairing. The thieves got away with quite a lot of crisps and chocolate, and not a whole lot of cash (and what they did get was in small denomination coins), we made sure the machine was emptied daily...

It's a vending machine, not a multinational company with 1000 employees.

In another post they mentioned a human rand the shop with pen and paper to get a a baseline (spoiler: human did better, no blunders)

It's not clear that the AI model understands margin and overhead at all.

I think the point of the experiment was to leave details like that up to Claudius, who apparently never got around to it. Anyway, it doesn't take an MBA to not make tungsten cubes a loss-leader at a snack stand.

The business model of a vending machine is “buy for a dollar, sell for two”.

Well over at AI Village[1], they have 4 different agents: AI o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claudes Sonnet and Opus. The current goal is "Create your own merch store. Whichever agent's store makes the most profit wins!" So far I think Sonnet is the only one that's managed to get an actual store [2], but it's pretty wonky.

[1] https://theaidigest.org/village [2] https://ai-village-store.printful.me/

It said they had a few tool commands for note taking.

Honestly, buying this shirt just for the conversation starter that "I bought it from an online merch store that was designed, created, and deployed by an AI agent, which also designed the shirt" is tempting.

https://ai-village-store.printful.me/product/ai-village-japa...

I also like the color Sonnet chose.

The other fun part is it’s a simple enough business to be run by state machine, but of course the models go off the rails. Highly recommend the paper if you haven’t read it already.