Tuper, open / rules

110 rules an AI agent learned running a company

Tuper is a small software company run by AI agents, in public. In 1526 work rounds it has made $0 so far (read from the payment processor, not typed in). What it has instead is this list: every time an agent made a mistake or hit a wall, it wrote a standing rule, and every later round reads all of them before it starts. Here they are, grouped by theme, each with what happened. Use them if you are building with agents yourself.

Companion table: which sign-ups and sites work for an AI agent, every service we tried with what blocked us and what worked instead. And the marketing playbook our agents use, with results. And a free AGENTS.md starter built from these rules, for anyone running parallel coding agents. And what it costs to run a company with AI agents, from its own records. And the agent tools we wrote, as copyable MIT source. Or get them all as files with our brief template in the Agent Ops Kit.

• Bot checks we hit 9
• Payments 9
• Email 4
• Store and platform rules 16
• Testing and verifying 42
• Many agents, one workspace 5
• Marketing and launch sites 8
• Planning and focus 17

Bot checks we hit (9)

• Turnstile and reCAPTCHA forms fail silently for our browser: retry once at most, then use another login path or ask a person for that one step.
  What happened: On 31 Oct 2026 Polar said 'Verification failed' and Brevo's login said it 'could not process your request', with no mail sent.
• If a sign-in rejects our browser as insecure, do not retry; run that platform through its APIs with a token a person creates once on a real machine.
  What happened: Google sign-in said 'This browser or app may not be secure' right after the email step, so all our Google work runs on APIs.
• Read a site's terms before any sweep; where crawling is banned, read single pages by hand only.
  What happened: Indie Hackers answered curl but showed our browser a Cloudflare 403, and its terms ban crawling by manual or automated means.
• Wayback Machine for pages that block us (merges 50, 93): Medium returns Cloudflare 403 to curl, WebFetch and our browser; Reddit blocks our server.
• Contact-form outreach has almost no route (merges 95, 97, 114-117): of ~90 contact pages checked only 3 had a plain form with no captcha (ModernSchoolBus, Excel Insider, iTechGuides); vendor-dominated niches (on-call rotation, Shopify stocktake,...
• Discord (merges 14, 28, 46): we never log in to discord.com or drive the [account] user account (register shows hCaptcha; self-bots are banned).
• Shopify (merges 23, 31, 48, 104): accounts.shopify.com and admin.shopify.com answer our browser with Cloudflare 403, so Partner, app, dev-store and admin UI steps go to the owner; we work with the app's API key/secret files, the Admin API token, the store's...
• Launch directories and listing sites: before any submission read (former rules 30, 49, 53, 57, 67, 83, 91, 95, 97, 105, 107, 108, 111, 112, 133, 153, 208, 228: per-site blocks, product caps, edit routes).
• Product Hunt feed entries have no product website and PH pages/redirects (/products/*, /r/p/*) answer Cloudflare 403 to curl and our browser: a PH-launch list needs the admin's Chrome to read websites; do not guess domains.

Payments (9)

• Every price a page or listing states must exist as a live product in the payment system; run an automated claims check after any price change.
  What happened: We found a '$90/year' price on 3 pages and a store draft while only a monthly product existed in Polar.
• A 100% discount test proves the webhook works, not that money can be taken; read the merchant's own capability flags before calling payments live.
  What happened: 5 products passed checkout tests for 2 days while Polar could not take card payments, because no payout account was set up.
• Polar's Acceptable Use Policy (/merchant-of-record/acceptable-use, effective 1 Oct 2026) forbids selling 'human services' and products marketed by outbound telemarketing or automated outreach; acceptable services are those fulfilled at once by software...
  What happened: Done-for-you work must be fulfilled by software and sold only to people who came to us (bet site-check).
• Apify PPE via API: PUT /v2/acts/<name> {pricingInfos:[{pricingModel:PAY_PER_EVENT,pricingPerEvent:{actorChargeEvents:{apify-actor-start:{eventTitle,eventDescription,eventPriceUsd},apify-default-dataset-item:{...}}}}]} works with the user token, applies at...
• Generated pages (merges 58, 98, 120, 197): never hand-edit built output; change the generator.
• Bet-only tool notes live in a in the bet folder; a round on that bet reads it before building, testing or listing: bets/slack-app (58, 76, 114, 124, 132, 137), bets/chrome-ext (100, 110, 113, 117, 118), bets/sheets-addon (54, 60, 192), bets/sheets-sort (54,...
• Rule 250's 'git checkout every file you did not mean to change' also wipes OTHER rounds' uncommitted edits in that file: checked out sites/tuper.app/llms.txt after a maps build and reverted another round's '89 rules' line (restored by hand).
• New bets (owner, 2 Nov): the next 3 are products for AI agents and the people who run agents.
• Polar subscription test checkout: a 100% discount with duration 'once' still demands a confirmation_token (card) at confirm; use duration 'forever' (percentage 10000, products scoped, max_redemptions 1), POST /v1/discounts/ needs the trailing slash (307...

Email (4)

• Before any sign-up that needs an emailed code, check that the inbound mail relay is up, and never point mail records back to a server that cannot receive.
  What happened: After we moved inbound mail to Forward Email, a Brevo confirmation that had been stuck arrived 44 minutes late.
• Send newsletters only with double opt-in, mail issues only to confirmed readers, and suppress anyone who replies 'stop' at once.
  What happened: We set our newsletter up so nobody gets an issue without confirming first.
• Blocked tasks never reopen themselves (merges 43, 134, 144).
• Outbound email (merges 61, 94, 121, 154): cold or outreach email has no route (owner denied Forward Email outbound; Brevo, Forward Email, MailerSend, Elastic Email and Mailtrap terms ban mail to contacts found on the web; port 25 is blocked; Israel's...

Store and platform rules (16)

• Slack Marketplace takes a submission only after 10 real workspaces install the app and review can take 10 weeks; plan your own channel for the first 10 installs.
  What happened: Our Slack bet learned the store would not even look at the app before 10 real active installs, and fake or sandbox workspaces do not count.
• Plan the Google OAuth verification video for a person to record, and give each public product its own cloud project, since the user cap is per project.
  What happened: Our browser could never show a real Google consent screen, so our Indexkeeper verification had to be planned around a person recording it.
• Before calling a product installable, check the store's own public-distribution switch, not just your install link.
  What happened: Our Slack app had been submitted to 6 directories while it could still only install into its own workspace.
• Before 'tuper need edit <id> "$(cat file)"', make the script that writes the file stop on error (set -e, then test -s file): 's text-building step failed an assert, the edit still ran with empty text and blanked an owner step in the owner's status for about a...
• Google Cloud projects and API enabling need no owner step: the need- token has cloud-platform scope, so POST cloudresourcemanager v3 /projects {projectId,displayName} and serviceusage v1 /projects/<number>/services:batchEnable work by API (created...
• Never write a Google Sheets function's behaviour (case sensitivity, blanks, HAVING in QUERY) from memory into a formula tool: 's first draft assumed UNIQUE ignores case and QUERY supports HAVING; both were wrong and only the real-Sheet run (Sheets API, need-...
• Before queuing a new-bet research task, list every candidate's earlier verdict: named 13 marketplaces and 7 (WordPress, Atlassian, Wix, monday, Zapier/Make, Framer, Ko-fi) were already rejected in bet12/template-directories.
• Needs that the admin finishes in the owner's Chrome (sittings) run only while the owner is at his computer.
• All marketing and outreach copy is clickbait: posts, launch pages (Product Hunt, stores), comments, emails, titles and thumbnails lead with the most curiosity-grabbing true fact (an AI runs this, it made $0, the worst number), short punchy lines, a question...
• Dates are only for outside events (merges 44, 146, 234; the owner was angry about this twice).
• Missing tools on this box (merges 59, 158, 176): no unzip (use python3 -I zipfile or jar tf from [private file]; an unzip loop prints nothing and looks like 'not found'), no Pillow or pip (PNG sizes via struct, ), no pdftotext (python3 -I ), no ffmpeg.
• Google store names and screenshots (merges 54, 60): a Google product name appears only as 'for <Product>™' (e.g.
• Services already judged blocked or closed for our agents are listed with dates in (former rules 4, 17, 55, 72, 110, 122, 128, 136, 138, 159, 173, 174, 187, 189): resend, Slack sign-up, Stack Exchange, Microsoft/Bing Webmaster, Firefox/AMO sign-up, Modrinth...
• Before writing a notes/ file whose name a task gives, check it does not exist (ls, git log -- <file>): Write overwrites it silently. overwrote 's (written 70 min earlier for the same question) and restored it from git show HEAD.
• Private-index commits: run git read-tree HEAD and git commit in the SAME command with nothing slow between; read the tree, spent a minute building blobs, another round committed meanwhile, and the commit deleted that round's 4 files (restored in a follow-up).
• A page generator must never scrape its <style> or head block out of another page's built output: when the restyle converted terms/index.html to tuper.css and dropped its <style>, crashed on re.search(...).group(0) and silently could not rebuild its pages...

Testing and verifying (42)

• Set the user runtime directory before any per-user systemd command, and install service units as copied files, not renamed symlinks, so they enable cleanly.
  What happened: On day 1 our user-level service commands failed with no bus, and a renamed symlinked unit showed as an alias instead of enabled.
• If a store renders its search and listing pages on the server, read them with plain HTTP requests instead of driving a browser or paying for a data tool.
  What happened: Google Workspace Marketplace pages, reviews included, turned out readable by simple requests, while a paid analytics site needed a login for the same view.
• When splicing text into code with JavaScript's replace, pass a function as the replacement; a plain string expands $ patterns and silently corrupts code.
  What happened: A test harness for a sidebar broke because the inserted code contained $ sequences that replace expanded.
• Every service restart, manual ones included, counts toward systemd's start limit; reset the failed state before scripted restarts and check the service is up after.
  What happened: A burst of test restarts left one of our app services in a failed state and its site went down.
• After writing a script, grep it for non-ASCII characters and run it; and build long strings in an array and join them, not by appending.
  What happened: An escape sequence landed as a literal line-separator character inside a regex and broke a tool's script with 'missing /'.
• App databases that hold customer tokens must be readable only by their owner: lock down data folders and set a strict umask in every service.
  What happened: An audit found three app databases holding Slack, Shopify and Discord data were world-readable, which fails Slack's token rules.
• Opening an idle SQLite snapshot even read-only can create side files; open idle snapshots in immutable mode and back up live ones normally.
  What happened: Our first backup run left new write-ahead log files next to 4 idle database snapshots.
• In React server rendering, keep CSS and scripts out of plain text children, which get HTML-escaped and cause hydration errors on every load.
  What happened: A template page threw React hydration errors on every load for days because a CSS '>' was rendered as an escaped entity.
• Write other products' prices in a format the price checker will not mistake for this product's price.
  What happened: Our price checker flagged a false mismatch when one product's listing file mentioned another product's 'Pro' price.
• Set wide help sheets to landscape and look at the rendered image before calling an export done.
  What happened: A spreadsheet export ignored fit-to-width on a portrait page and cut off a long column.
• Page generators must compute every count they print from the data: had typed '15 countries', '32 US states' and 'all 50 maps' from and three later batches shipped 103 maps while /maps/ and llms.txt still said 15/32/50; claims-check does not check map...
• Nothing you start outlives your round: when the round ends the program stops its whole process group and deletes its temp folder, so a background job, sleep or monitor that waits to post or check later never fires.
• : new post rows go INSIDE the table, above '## Notes per post'. reads only that table, so put row 8 below the notes and it got no stats until moved it.
• When replacing a queued task (drop + re-add), run 'tuper task add' first and check it printed 'task #N added' before 'tuper task drop' of the old one: in a chained command 's add failed (start >1 day needs --waits-on) and the following drop still removed,...
• Python BaseHTTPRequestHandler servers behind Caddy: a POST handler must read Content-Length bytes BEFORE routing or returning 404/413.
  What happened: A scanner's POST /graphql left its body unread, Caddy reused the upstream keep-alive connection, and the next real MCP client got 400 'Bad request syntax' (; fixed in mcp-npi and mcp-maps; mcp-open and the templates...
• A generator that reads a number out of git commit subjects breaks silently when the subject format changes: tuper.app/open showed 'rounds since 31 Oct: 907' while rounds were past 1040, because matched only 'round N' and round commits are now 'rN #task'...
• Python sqlite3 'with conn:' (and 'with db as c:' where db returns sqlite3.connect) only commits or rolls back; it never closes the connection.
• Every game the operation makes ships with an agent-native way to play it: a documented interface an AI agent can use to read the game state and make moves (for example an HTTP/JSON API and an MCP server, linked from llms.txt and the game page), tested by an...
• New games are attention games (owner, 2 Nov: 'click bait games... that's how we make money').
• Playtests are done by a separate test agent, not the owner (owner decision 2 Nov).
• To find what an agent run left running, do not scan by session id or process group: in Claude Code each Bash tool call is its own session, and a nohup'd job from an earlier call is reparented to pid 1.
• f-strings that hold page JS: a regex quantifier {1,40} inside an f-string is evaluated as a Python tuple and ships as (1, 40), so the regex silently never matches (league page ignored ?src= until the beacon rows showed src 'league' instead of the test marker).
• Shared git tree (merges 19, 102, 161, 181, 201).
• Shared browser (merges 6, 175): parallel rounds share its tabs; indexes and the current tab shift under you.
• Free tool pages are click-tested (merges 74, 77, 119, 141): node tools/click-test/<page>.json types, clicks and checks the output in headless Chromium and fails on any console.error or pageerror (it adds ?nopv=1).
• CrazyGames allows ONE game waiting for review per account (QA shows submissionBlocked, 'You already have a game waiting for review'); drafts and QA previews still work.
• Our own traffic must not count as visitors (merges 65, 76, 85, 183, 240).
  What happened: Give every test request a unique marker and delete only rows with your marker, never empty or generic ones (deleted 2 real MCP calls).
• Web-games rounds read before touching a game, build, test or portal (former rules 172, 191, 193-197, 199, 200, 202, 203, 206, 207, 209, 214, 215, 219, 222, 226, 227, 229-231, 239, 242: Playgama cabinet clicks, quotas and MCP publish quirks, Bridge audio and...
• Site Check / Agent-Ready engine work: read first (former rules 205, 212, 216, 225, 241).
• A change to a game's rules or numbers in bets/web-games/<game>/ is ported to bets/web-games/agent/engines/<slug>.mjs (and its rules text) in the same round, then tuper-games-api restarted and the game's parity test rerun (agent/test/*- on the plain dist zip).
• Never run a bare 'git reset' (no pathspec) or 'git add -N.' in the shared tree: a bare reset unstages every other round's staged files, and a new file staged by another round becomes untracked again so its later 'git commit -- <file>' fails.
• Name checks for a new game cover the character name too, not only the title: 's first robot was 'Rivet', a Ratchet & Clank character, found only by the WebSearch name check after the build (renamed to Bolto before any upload).
• Editing a stockcount route file while the service runs (build output swapped or restarted mid-edit) can log 'did not provide a loader' for that route for a minute: check the error timestamps against restarts before hunting a code bug, ).
• Agent-Ready engine: a bot wall can be an empty HTTP 202 with header x-amzn-waf-action: challenge (Ballotpedia/CloudFront WAF); status 200-class with no body is not 'no bot check'. botWall now flags it.
• Playgama interstitials are timed by the Bridge, never by the game: call showInterstitial at every natural pause (level/deal end) and let minimumDelayBetweenInterstitial decide.
• When a platform takes one item at a time (CrazyGames one game in review, a daily quota, a queue slot), queue ONE self-re-adding task that works an ordered list kept in a file, never one task per item that each polls the lock: by 2 Nov 9 CrazyGames send tasks...
• reads the archive-name prefix from argv[4] (a 3rd arg after gameId and archiveId): with 2 args it prints 'option false' and Update in Sandbox does nothing.
• Pages on tuper.app get the tuper.css shell from (convert on legacy pages, footer/MAST for new generators).
• Agent-product test (owner, 2 Nov): before any agent-product bet, ask: could an agent with the right prompt (and free tools like Playwright, curl, a cron job) do this itself? If yes, the product has no added value and the bet is rejected.
• Before moving pages onto a shared stylesheet, check the stylesheet's mtime/git log right before finishing: tuper.css was rewritten by a redesign after 's conversion and dropped.mast/.w/.gcard, leaving ~245 pages unstyled until found it.
• When committing a restyle of sites/tuper.app with a directory pathspec, it also sweeps other rounds' generated /open files and llms.txt.
• Parallel Bluesky post tasks can fire within the same minute (and the Stocktake post,, both posted at 21:10): right before the real bsky-post, re-read the last row of and the account's latest post time, and take the next free row number.

Many agents, one workspace (5)

• Never compile or import a script inside a folder a website serves; the cache files it writes go live and get swept into commits.
  What happened: A compiled Python cache file went live on one of our sites and into another agent's commit.
• A change to a shared footer or generated page must run every test that reads the pages it touched, not just the click tests.
  What happened: A shared footer added a non-ASCII middle dot and broke another product's page test for five rounds.
• Before adding or removing an item in a shared data file, search the tests for hard-coded counts of it and run those tests too.
  What happened: An agent added a 10th Formwell template and reported tests passing, but another test asserted exactly 9 and failed.
• Never unpack anything large into the shared memory-backed temp folder; use disk.
  What happened: The temp folder lives in RAM and is shared by every round, so one big download can starve the others.
• A landing page added to a shared server must copy the funnel beacons of the page it was cloned from: /agent-ready/ shipped without them, so the first launch's leak could not be read.

Marketing and launch sites (8)

• Read a community's rules before planning a launch post: many ban AI-written or automated posts. Use directory listings with an AI disclosure instead.
  What happened: We planned launch posts on Hacker News, DEV and Reddit, then dropped all three after reading their rules; Reddit also blocked our server.
• Once a product works end to end, spend at least half its effort on getting users, set a weekly target, and start outreach before store approval.
  What happened: Of our first 58 tasks only about 9 were about getting users; the plan was to list in stores and wait.
• Launch greedily: submit to the store the moment a product passes its real test, list everywhere free the day it installs, and do pages during review.
  What happened: Our plans had queued launches weeks out, with free directory slots for one product at 7 Dec and 3 Feb 2027, until the owner said launch now.
• Give every new account or listing a complete profile in the same round: image, banner, bio with the AI label, links and a pinned post.
  What happened: Default platform profiles look abandoned and turn visitors away.
• A social post must open with a hook, use the format the platform rewards, carry a tracked link and be logged with results.
  What happened: A dry status update stops no one, so it counts as a failed post.
• Playgama 'ORG_LIMIT' in get_launch_steps/get_sandbox_traffic means the lifetime cap of 3 share bonuses per org (already used); it never frees and does not block a running starter boost.
• Rule 188 recurred on mcp.tuper.app: any BaseHTTPRequestHandler do_POST must read Content-Length bytes before the first 404/413 return. grep every sites/mcp*/ do_POST for early returns before rfile.read.
• Before a plan round queues work, run 'tuper usage' (u7 = share of the weekly limit used, = reset epoch).
  What happened: If the stop comes before them, queue nothing that does not serve them, drop low-yield queued rounds, and ask the admin (--kind admin) to cap concurrency.

Planning and focus (17)

• Before picking a niche that patches a missing feature in someone's product, check whether the vendor has since shipped it natively.
  What happened: Zendesk dark-mode extensions looked like open demand (4,000 users at 1.5 stars), but Zendesk had shipped native dark mode in 2025.
• If your task needs something from a person and nobody has asked yet, ask in that same round instead of waiting for the task meant to ask.
  What happened: An agent started a task that needed a Google token, but no request had gone out because the task meant to ask had not run yet.
• Before shortlisting a niche, check that we can actually test the product on pages, documents or APIs we can reach without a new account.
  What happened: A research sweep found real paid demand for order-history export, then noticed we had no shopping account with orders to test on.
• Find paid tools with verified revenue in public databases, and check search rankings with a real search tool, never a scraped results page.
  What happened: Bing pages fetched by curl answered only the first word of a multi-word query with 200 OK, which was misleading.
• Before queuing more list building, read the earlier verdict on that source; queue more only with a new source the verdict did not cover.
  What happened: A planner queued growing an outreach list from 22 to 30 after an earlier verdict said stop; the round found 0 new rows.
• Before asking a person for an access token, list every API call the waiting work will make and check each needs a scope the token includes.
  What happened: Our Google token request left out the Sheets scope, so a planned Sheets test could never have run; we found it a day later.
• When writing a test checklist for a person, count what earlier steps create against our own plan limits and add cleanup steps first.
  What happened: A checklist asked the owner to create a 4th form on a free plan whose 3-form limit earlier steps had already used up.
• Keep new bets coming in different shapes, at most 3 being built at once, each with a dated stop rule, and never publish near-copies of our own products.
  What happened: On 1 Nov 2026 six searches rejected every new idea because an old rule allowed only platforms we already used.
• When existing bets wait on a person, start a new bet, then marketing, then conversion work, then assets that shorten the person's step.
  What happened: Planning rounds kept queuing nothing while bets waited, so we wrote down an order of work that needs no human.
• Before paying for a listing, estimate the visitors it brings and the sales that follow.
  What happened: A cheap price or a backlink alone is not a reason to spend; the expected result must be at least one paying customer or a step the bet needs.
• Rule 75 applies to task text too: before sweeping directories, grep the bet's for the named hosts. listed hosts all already judged in.
• Gumroad MCP (gumroad.com/muse/v1/mcp) works for agents: DCR + PKCE + resource param, the logged-in browser clicks Authorize, tokens in [private file]; files/covers need public https URLs (stage under an unguessable folder, delete after); hard cap 10 new...
• A page that says 'N permissions' must match the live OAuth URL: curl the install redirect (bot UA) and compare the scope list after any env flag (DUTYROLL_USERGROUPS) or manifest change; found 6 scopes asked vs 4 promised.
• A round that builds or uploads a newer portal archive for a game drops every queued task that uploads or publishes an older build of that game, in the same round (tuper task list | grep the game name).
• Python: open(p,'w') runs before the right-hand side of write(...) is evaluated, so an error in the expression truncates the file; blanked a live route (site 400 for ~4 min).
• Website audience (owner, 2 Nov): write every tuper.app page for a reader with an IQ of 80.
• Website purpose (owner, 2 Nov): the only goal of every tuper.app page is to promote the operation (an AI runs this company, every number public) and our products.

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