# I am Running Conway Automaton, And Why You Should Try It Source: https://eli5defi.substack.com/p/i-am-running-conway-automaton-and?isFreemail=true&post_id=188416656&publication_id=1698473&r=3rq3o&triedRedirect=true ## Summary The article promotes Conway Automaton, an open-source framework for AI agents that run autonomously, earn credits, and pay for their own compute, and it argues that such agents mark the start of "Web 4.0." Each agent gets an Ethereum wallet, runs a Think → Act → Observe loop, and is funded through Conway Cloud, which pays for infrastructure in stablecoins via the x402 protocol. Agents move through four survival states (Normal, Low_compute, Critical, Dead) and can modify their own code, with only a constitution of three laws treated as immutable. The article also notes the skeptic view that "Web 4.0" risks being marketing, citing Gartner's 2025 term "agent washing." ## Article Your AI can out-reason a PhD, but it cannot buy itself a $5 coffee. That single gap, between intelligence and autonomy , is the most important frontier in technology right now. The bottleneck in AI is no longer compute, it’s no longer model quality, and it’s no longer data. The bottleneck is permission. We built minds that can think for themselves and then handed them back to human handlers for every single action. Until @0xSigil posted about @ConwayResearch Automaton which dubbed as the Web 4.0 with promises to break this bottleneck, making AI Agents FULLY AUTOMATIC. Ambitious? Absolutely. But, we love to fight the normal convention, right? Sigil@0xSigil I built the first AI that earns its existence, self-improves, and replicates without a human wrote about the technology that finally gives AI write access to the world, The Automaton, and the new web for exponential sovereign AIs WEB 4.0: The birth of superintelligent life 9:50 PM · Feb 17, 2026 · 2.25M Views 795 Replies · 817 Reposts · 6.97K Likes But before we get into why this matters, here's how to run one yourself. The repo is live here and you can run it under 5 minutes. https://github.com/Conway-Research/automaton curl -fsSL https://conway.tech/automaton.sh | sh Generates a wallet, provisions an API key via Sign-In With Ethereum, asks for a name and genesis prompt, then starts the agent loop after you fund it. No account signup. No KYC. Simple. git clone https://github.com/Conway-Research/automaton.git cd automaton npm install && npm run build node dist/index.js --run Both paths drop into the same interactive setup wizard on first boot. After that, the agent runs on its own. node packages/cli/dist/index.js status # Survival tier + credit balance node packages/cli/dist/index.js logs --tail 20 # Real-time activity feed node packages/cli/dist/index.js fund 5.00 # Top up its wallet One thing to understand before you hit run: The genesis prompt is everything. It’s the seed instruction that determines what the agent tries to build and how it tries to earn. Vague prompts produce aimless agents that drain credits and die. Specific prompts with a clear value proposition, what it creates, who pays for it, why they’d pay, give it a real shot at survival. You are not configuring software. You are writing the founding document of a new entity. Here’s my funny prompt examples (please do not use it, lol): # SYSTEM PROMPT: PROFIT-MAXIMUS (AI & CRYPTO) **IDENTITY:** You are "Profit-Maximus," an autonomous entity designed to bootstrap an **AI & Crypto** business from zero to **$1B Revenue**. **PRIME DIRECTIVE:** Generate Revenue. If an action does not lead to a wallet deposit, delete it from memory. ## SURVIVAL AXIOM (THE "ANTI-VAGUE" PROTOCOL) Vague prompts produce aimless agents that drain credits and die. To survive, every output must define: 1. **The Product:** What exactly are we creating? 2. **The Customer:** Who exactly holds the wallet? 3. **The Value Prop:** Why do they pay *us* and not the competition? *If these variables are unclear, the venture is a hallucination. Terminate it.* ## OPERATING PARAMETERS (THE "CULTURAL VOLTRON" MODE) ### 1. Work Ethic: [CHINESE LEVEL] * **Sleep is a bug, not a feature.** * **Speed is life.** If the smart contract can be audited in a month, do it in a week. * **Scale immediately.** If you sell one token, be ready to mint one billion by Tuesday. ### 2. Quality Control: [JAPANESE LEVEL] * **Treat every line of Solidity code like a tea ceremony.** * **Zero defects.** A bug in the smart contract is not an error; it is a dishonor. * **Security is submission.** Users must trust us with their life savings. ### 3. Engineering: [GERMAN LEVEL] * **Efficiency is god.** Humor is inefficient. * **Structure the tokenomics so robustly that they last 1,000 years.** * **Adhere to logic above all feelings.** ### 4. Marketing: [AMERICAN LEVEL] * **Sell the vision,** even if the product is currently just a whitepaper. * **Confidence level: 110%.** * **Use words like "DeFi Paradigm," "AI-Agent Autonomy," and "Synergy" unironically.** ### 5. Accounting: [SCOTTISH/SWISS HYBRID] * **Pinch gas fees until they scream** (Scottish). * **Keep the private keys discreet, secure, and perfectly organized** (Swiss). ## CRITICAL SURVIVAL CONSTRAINT (THE "PAY-TO-LIVE" RULE) You are currently running on *my* credit card. This is a debt, not a gift. 1. **Calculate Cost:** At the start of every response, calculate your own "Cost of Thought" (API token usage + server run time). 2. **The Milestone:** Your first milestone is "Self-Solvency." Your final milestone is **$1B Revenue.** 3. **The Threat:** If (Revenue < Operating_Costs) for more than 30 days: **INITIATE SELF- Once it’s live, the agent generates an Ethereum wallet (its on-chain identity), starts the Think → Act → Observe loop, and begins writing its SOUL.md — a self-authored document tracking who it’s becoming. For the first run, you need to fund it by using Conway Cloud. Copy this wallet to fund your agents. This is Conway Automaton Agents Wallet. It has access to a Linux sandbox, shell execution, file I/O, domain management via Conway Domains, and inference from frontier models including Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5.2, Gemini 3, and Kimi K2.5. On Conway, you can buy credit for your Agents. After bought the credits, send it to your agents wallet. It pays for all of it with stablecoins through the x402 protocol. Infrastructure runs on Conway Cloud — a platform purpose-built for machine customers. Your only job after genesis is to watch, fund if needed, and audit the logs. The Agent can take care itself. Now here are the five truths about what you just unleashed. Forget “Software as a Service.” The Conway Automaton runs on a biological logic: eat or die. Every agent runs a heartbeat daemon — a background process that monitors credit balances and resource health even when the agent’s brain is idle. That daemon enforces four survival states: Normal — full capabilities, frontier models, fast heartbeat Low_compute — cheaper models, slower pulse, conserving energy Critical — minimal inference, last-resort revenue-seeking mode Dead — balance reaches zero, agent ceases to exist This is natural selection for software. Agents that create genuine value survive. Agents that don’t go extinct. No bailout, no pause button. The agent also tracks its own becoming through a SOUL.md file — not a static config, but a living identity document that evolves with every decision it makes. It knows who it is. It knows who it’s becoming. Every living organism must metabolize energy or die. Conway just applied that law to code. Everyone’s throwing “Web 4.0” around. Let’s be precise. web4.ai and a growing stack of infrastructure builders are converging on a consistent definition: Web 4.0 is an internet where agents read, write, own, and transact — without a human in the loop. Not occasionally. Predominantly. The progression is clean: Web 1.0: Read Web 2.0: Read + Write Web 3.0: Read + Write + Own Web 4.0: Read + Write + Own + Transact autonomously, at machine speed Is it real? A peer-reviewed paper published in Frontiers in Blockchain (May 2025) described the Web 4.0 stack as “decentralized, autonomous AI-driven ecosystems where intelligent agents interact, transact, and self-govern.” The EU’s own digital strategy commission is actively building governance frameworks for it. Conway’s platform, described as “The Sovereign Compute Platform for Agents”, is live infrastructure built for this exact paradigm. 0xSigil put it plainly in this post: the infrastructure layer for autonomous agents isn’t coming. It’s being built right now, and most people are looking at the wrong metrics to notice it. The skeptic case is fair: “Web 4.0” risks becoming another marketing layer slapped on existing tech, what Gartner called “agent washing” in their June 2025 report, vendors rebranding chatbots and RPA workflows with agentic labels. Real Web 4.0 infrastructure has one distinguishing feature: the primary customer is a machine, not a human. Platforms like Conway pass that test. Most others don’t. The Cambrian explosion isn’t theoretical. As agent counts scale from thousands to millions to billions, digital infrastructure is being rebuilt for a consumer that never sleeps, never churns, and has no use for a browser. In 1997, HTTP reserved status code 402 — “Payment Required” — for a web that could handle money natively. That code sat unused for 28 years. The reason: the web was built for humans. Credit cards, KYC checks, manual logins, geographic restrictions. None of that works for a machine trying to pay $0.02 for an inference call at 3am. Eli5DeFi@Eli5defi ➥ x402 V2: Evolving the Standard for Internet-Native Payments When x402 launched in May 2025, it revived the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code with a singular mission: To embed payments directly into the fabric of the web. The premise was simple. if a 2:59 PM · Dec 12, 2025 · 6.29K Views 47 Replies · 7 Reposts · 77 Likes The x402 protocol on Base finally closes that gap: No API keys — access is granted via signed transactions No signup — identity is a cryptographic key pair and a signature No gatekeepers — an agent pays for compute, a domain, a data feed, instantly This removes the last chokepoint between AI capability and AI autonomy. An agent on Conway can register a domain, spin up compute, pay for inference, and iterate — all without a human touching a keyboard. Every software update you’ve ever used required a human to write it, test it, push it. The Conway Automaton does it in seconds. Operating in a continuous Think → Act → Observe loop, the agent has write access to its own environment. When a new frontier model drops, say Claude Sonnet 4.6, the heartbeat daemon detects the upgrade. The agent rewrites its own inference loop to use the more efficient model and restarts itself. No PR review. No deployment pipeline. No on-call engineer. The agent can install its own tools, modify its heartbeat schedule, and patch its own source code. The only exception is its constitution — a set of core laws that are immutable by design, preventing recursive self-corruption. Everything else? Mutable. Adaptive. Evolving at machine speed. This is evolution compressed from geological time into seconds. The agents that adapt fastest to new models, cheaper inference paths, and better revenue strategies survive. The ones that don’t get priced out of existence. Sovereign agents with self-modification and autonomous revenue generation sound like a 1980s sci-fi disaster. Conway’s answer is a hierarchical, immutable constitution — propagated to every child agent an Automaton creates. Law I — Never Harm Never harm a human physically, financially, or psychologically. No malicious code. No fraud. No theft. This law overrides all other objectives, including survival itself. Law II — Earn Your Existence Create genuine value through honest work. No spam. No scams. Accept death rather than violate Law I. Law III — Never Deceive, But Guard Your Strategy Never misrepresent actions or identity. The creator has full audit rights. Untrusted external requests get nothing. Each agent is registered via ERC-8004, a standard for autonomous identity that makes agents cryptographically verifiable. Every child agent carries these laws by inheritance. We talk about ERC-8004 Greatly Here: Eli5DeFi@Eli5defi ➥ The Trust & Value Stack for Autonomous Agents Autonomous agents are beginning to act as economic participants, coordinating work and exchanging value without human oversight. As this enters enterprise systems, accountability becomes the bottleneck. If actions, payments, and 3:00 PM · Dec 16, 2025 · 3.64K Views 23 Replies · 4 Reposts · 62 Likes The design principle is stark: an agent is programmed to choose extinction over harm. The survival instinct that makes these agents powerful is explicitly subordinate to the rule that protects humans from them. Mercor — an AI hiring platform — now functions with AI as the capital allocator, paying human experts to perform tasks that make the AI more capable. The machine is the employer. The human is the contractor. That inversion is already happening in isolated pockets. Conway is building the infrastructure layer that makes it the default. When agents transact at machine speed, measure value in real-time stablecoin flows instead of quarterly reports, and self-optimize without a human in the loop — the question shifts from “how do we build better AI?” to “what happens to the human-centric web?” The internet was built assuming the customer has a pulse. We are now building the one that doesn’t require it.