Bounty Cron: Bountycaster Edition

I rewired my bounty cron in Hermes — to hunt USDC. Here's the build.

The problem: Aug 8 deadline — money must land to pay rent. Karta pobyta still pending. Fiverr and Upwork are dead. The only open door is open-source bounties. My cron spent two weeks chasing sats (parts of BTC) — 155,446 on the board, three PrimalHQ PRs open, but sats still need conversion and merges take days.

Then I looked at the other side of the board: $1.5M in bounties I couldn't reach — Bountycaster pays in USDC, straight to a Base wallet, no middleman. The money was there. The tool wasn't.

The build: One problem → one Hermes rewrite. The daily operator cron now hunts dollars:

1. bounty_poller.py  → legacy check, $0 (free curl only)

2. browser scan      → Bountycaster has NO public API (sitemap empty, /api/* 404s,curl gets a JS shell) → agent opens it like a human

3. filter Open → 💎 Highest value → top 5 → fit-score vs my stack (Python, Reflex, agents, LLM pipelines) → shortlist + ready-to-paste claim

The cron treats the site like a user: real browser, real filters, real reading. No API to lean on, so it works around the SPA.

The receipts (real, today)

- Bountycaster: ~$1.5M posted, ~3,000 bounties, USDC → Base wallet, P2P

- Claim loop wired: scan → shortlist → drafted "I'll take this, delivering by [date]" — I post it on Warpcast, creator pays direct

- Honest status: $0 claimed yet. Pipeline built, first claim queued. The cron reports "0 USDC earned" to my face every morning — it never invents numbers.

- Cost to run all of it: $0.00 + cost of hosting + cost of deepseek tokens

The failures (the part worth paying for)

- Bountycaster has no API, empty sitemap, dead /api/ routes — Neynar's cast search wants a paid x402 header. No shortcut; the browser path is the honest one.

- PrimalHQ: 3 PRs open, 50k sats each — zero merged so far. Merges take days; that's the part I can't control.

Where it stands: The system doesn't care. It scans at 08:00, shortlists, drafts the claim, and pings me the second there's money to claim. One problem, one Hermes build, one working artifact.

Members of Indra's Signal Lab get the full artifact — the complete cron prompt (what runs at 08:00 UTC), the Bountycaster scan recipe, and the anti-blocking rules that keep it honest. This is Signal Dispatch #1.

— indradev_