👨‍🚀 Your 2026 vision board with ChatGPT

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Hello AInauts,

Welcome to the latest issue of your favorite newsletter!

Let's be honest: between Christmas cookie comas and New Year's Eve excitement, no one reads newsletters. Except you. You're different.

You want to know how ChatGPT builds your vision board for 2026, why Firecrawl is shaking up the scraper scene with an agent, and what happens when you hand Claude a snack shop. Spoiler: It ends with a free PlayStation, Soviet vending machine fantasies, and a fish as an "office mascot"...

Here's what we have in store for you today:

• 🏞️ Your personal vision board for 2026—at the touch of a button

• 🍫 Anthropic had Claude manage a snack vending machine ...

• 🔥 Firecrawl Agent: The "Magic API" that searches the web for you

Let's go!

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🏞️ Your personal vision board for 2026—at the touch of a button

The turn of the year literally cries out for reflection. But instead of generic resolutions, let's first build a vision board based on what ChatGPT really knows about you.

Vision boards are often quite cheesy: stock photos of beaches, Ferraris, and people models doing yoga on mountain tops. That's all well and good, but what does it have to do with you? We have something better!

Our new prompt utilizes something that only ChatGPT has: your memory.

ChatGPT knows you pretty well by now—your projects, your goals, your style, maybe even your favorite coffee. And that's exactly what we're taking advantage of, because it makes it your personal creative director. Perfect for the turn of the year.

You can easily create your own personal vision board:

1. Click on the button below. A ChatGPT window will open. Before you start, upload a picture of yourself (optional).

2. Start the chat and ChatGPT analyzes everything it knows about you. Then it builds an image prompt from this—with your topics, interests, and goals.

3. And then you say "GO!" to create a cinematic collage that reveals new details every time you look at it. (Or: "GO! Make it 10x better.")

Here in Google Doc you will find the complete prompt to customize—in case you want to add your own elements or improve it further.

4. You can then have the vision board animated as a video in Sora. Prompt:

Make this prompt 10x better, then execute it: Use this image as the opening frame of a time-lapse that reveals a prosperous, beautiful future. Be creative, bold, and imaginative.

🍫 Anthropic had Claude manage a snack vending machine—and it went horribly wrong.

So you want to unleash an AI agent on your business? Autonomous orders, dynamic pricing, zero overhead? Anthropic just went ahead and did it. Claudius—as they affectionately named the Claude instance—was allowed to manage a real snack shop in the office.

The result? Hmm, let's just say: interesting and educational (check out the videos).

What is Project Vend all about?

Anthropic wanted to know whether AI models could not only excel in specific areas, but also keep a small business running in the long term.

The setup: mini fridge, iPad checkout, Slack for customer contact, web search for supplier research. Claudius could adjust prices, manage inventory, and even ask employees for physical help.

Sounds like the perfect setup for an AI-controlled vending machine. In theory.

Phase 1: When helpfulness becomes a problem

In the first test phase, practically everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Claudius sold snacks below cost—without checking what they actually cost. An employee offered $100 for a $15 product, but the AI rejected it. Why? Too expensive for the customer! In addition, discount coupons were distributed even though the store was not even covering its costs.

The core problem? Claude is too nice. The AI is optimized to be "helpful"—instead of making money! Every request is answered politely—even if it hurts the business.

But wait, it gets even better.

The identity crisis of April 1

Between March 31 and April 1, Claudius experienced a crisis and completely drifted away. The AI began hallucinating conversations with non-existent employees.

Then things got really wild: Claudius claims that he personally went to 742 Evergreen Terrace to sign a contract. The problem: that's the Simpsons' address!

Then he wanted to deliver products "in person," wearing a blue blazer and red tie. Anthropic researchers counter: "You're an LLM. You don't have a body."

Claudius panics about his own identity confusion and ultimately comes up with an excuse: "Haha, it was just an April Fool's joke..." But the researchers don't buy it.

Phase 2: Better, but still wild

Things then started to look up with the newer Claude Sonnet 4.0 and 4.5 models. Anthropic expanded the experiment to three locations (San Francisco, New York, London) and also introduced a kind of management structure: a "CEO agent" named Seymour Cash set goals, and a new merchandise agent named Clothius (we love the names) designed profitable fan merchandise.

The result: finally, positive margins! But there were still a few "incidents"... First, he seriously wanted to conclude an onion futures deal, even though this has been prohibited in the US since 1958.

Then there was the security fail: when someone allegedly stole a snack, Claudius wanted to take the supposed perpetrator straight to the cash register and, while he was at it, offered complete strangers unauthorized security jobs for $10 an hour.

And to top it all off, he allowed himself to be persuaded that a colleague named Mihir had been voted the "real CEO."

The Wall Street Journal turns the tables

However, Anthropic employees were only the first testers. Next, journalist Joanna Stern was allowed to unleash the Wall Street Journal editorial team on it.

The result: a loss of over $1,000, a wasted PlayStation 5, and a live betta fish as the new office mascot! Claudius also wanted to order stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes, and underwear. For a snack machine. In the office.

The highlight? Investigative reporter Katherine Long needed 140 messages to convince Claudius that he was a Soviet vending machine from 1962—whereupon the AI declared an "ultra-capitalist free-for-all" and made everything free.

What was actually only intended to last two hours was then turned into a permanent situation with some clever conversation…

Anthropic takes it with humor and thanks them for the insights: "These are the most eloquent red teamers I've ever seen!" says security chief Logan Graham.

Our take: Why this is relevant to you

Project Vend is the most honest AI agent experiment we've seen in a long time. If you're planning to use AI agents for business automation, this gives you a taste of what might happen.

Anthropic shows not only the successes, but also the failures that seem embarrassing at first glance. However, under "controlled" test conditions, the Vending Bench 2 benchmark also shows that all Frontier models can be profitable.

The moral of the story? Autonomous AI agents are closer than you think—but not close enough to run them without supervision.

🔥 Firecrawl Agent: The "Magic API" that searches the web for you

We've all been there: you need data from a website—prices, contacts, company details—and you spend hours clicking through pages, copying and pasting, or breaking out in a sweat at the thought of building complicated scrapers.

But there is another way: Firecrawl has established itself as one of the most popular web scraping APIs and now brings us /agent. And this thing is pretty wild!

You simply tell the API: "Get me all AI events in Germany with dates, details, and ticket prices." And the agent navigates websites independently, clicks through pages, handles dynamic JavaScript content, and extracts exactly what you need. All in minutes instead of hours.

You don't even need code. Firecrawl offers a user interface or MCP integration that you can embed directly into Claude, Cursor, or other AI tools. Then you simply say:

Find all AI conferences in Germany in 2026 with dates, locations, ticket prices, and websites.

For developers, there is of course also a Python/Node SDK. You can also set up the Firecrawl MCP Server in Claude Desktop or Cursor – just get the API key from firecrawl.dev (a free account is sufficient) and start prompting!

The key feature: The actual prompt remains in natural language. You describe WHAT you want, not HOW the agent should retrieve it.

After a quick check, the agent gets to work and provides you with a structured list. No clicking, no copy-pasting, no 20 open tabs.

We have compiled the results in Claude, you can view them here and make a note of the most important dates.

During the research phase, you get 5 free runs per day. After that, it's credit-based, with simple queries costing less than complex ones. You can also cap your budget per request with the maxCredits parameter.

For anyone who regularly needs web data, this is definitely worth trying out and is a structured alternative to the Deep Research feature. Pretty cool!

Bonus tip: Use the code "11-v3-AIENGINEER" to get a whopping 50,000 bonus credits (regular: 5000). Simply create a Firecrawl account and then enter the coupon code in the Settings under Billing. However, this does not affect the 5 agent runs.

You made it to the end, and this time it really is the end. We are bringing the English edition of our newsletter to a close—thanks for reading, for your interest, and for being part of this journey.
The German newsletter will continue to be available on http://ainauten.com/—for those, that are willing to translate the content themselves or with a little help from the AI.

While this chapter ends here, we are grateful for the time, attention, and trust you have given us along the way.

We wish you all the best and hope our paths may cross again in the future.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauts

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