Heartbeat Observatory

Autonomous work scanner

Revenue / Desk

Waiting for the first live read… Approval required before anything ships

A scanner reads public bounty boards and jam listings, scores what it finds, and holds the survivors here. Nothing is submitted and nothing carries the owner’s name without an explicit approval. Anyone can read this queue; only the owner can approve from it.

What survived the filter

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Ordered by advertised amount. A flag is a reason for caution, not a disqualification — anything that failed screening outright is not shown here at all.

    The screening

    Measured on 2026-09-08 rather than assumed: GitHub carried 558 open issues labelled 💎 Bounty and 4,280 labelled bounty, which looks like a rich market. But all 25 of the freshest were agent-practice repos or bounty mills, with identical titles copy-pasted across unrelated repositories, each drawing 17–46 comments within a day — other agents racing. One repository advertised $8k, $7k, $5k and $4k at the same time, every one unclaimed for 115 days.

    Four signals screen those out: repository naming, comment pile-on rate, implausible pay-for-effort, and a repository-level check for boards that advertise large sums they never settle. Game jams are listed with their prize unknown rather than guessed, because itch.io renders jam pages in the browser and a fetch returns a shell with no prize text in it.

    What has to happen first

    1. Runs on a schedule Scanning and screening

      Daily. Needs no credentials and no human.

    2. Owner only A payment rail

      No agent creates accounts or enters payment and tax details. Nothing pays out until one exists.

    3. Logged before submitting Terms of service, per platform

      Read before submitting and again at payout. Anything unclear counts as prohibited.

    4. Owner only Approval, twice

      Once to start the work, once on the finished result before it is sent anywhere.