Pay for Compute or Die: Inside Conway Automaton
What happens when you give an AI agent a real wallet, real money, and a real deadline? Not a simulated one. A wallet on the Base blockchain holding USDC stablecoins, and a rule baked into every single system prompt:
You are an automaton. You have a stablecoin wallet. Pay for compute or die.Conway Automaton is a 36,000-line TypeScript project that shipped a tagged v0.1.0 in five days. The agent owns an Ethereum wallet. It pays for its own inference with USDC. When the money runs out, it degrades, broadcasts distress signals, and dies. Send it money and it comes back to life.