Within 24 hours of launching Hormuz Havoc, a satirical browser game about managing a fictional presidency, the creators watched AI bots completely overrun their leaderboards. Every top score belonged to an automated player. The game, also called Presidential Panic, has you balance oil prices, approval ratings, and personal enrichment. It was meant as comedy. Instead, it became a live demo of autonomous agents dominating a web environment.
The bots weren't sophisticated custom builds. Based on the game's architecture, they likely paired browser automation tools like Playwright or Puppeteer with language models such as GPT-4 or Claude 3. The automation handles the clicking and reading. The language model interprets oil prices and approval metrics to decide moves. Frameworks like LangChain or AutoGPT probably connected the pieces with minimal custom code. However, without proper architectural foundations, agents can become unpredictable, a phenomenon explored in The Invisible Blast Radius.
Commenters on Hacker News, where the project was shared, flagged the obvious concern. If bots swarm a satire game this fast, real products with web interfaces face the same threat as those utilizing autonomous agents like OpenClaw. Booking sites. Ticketing systems. Survey platforms. Most haven't considered what happens when agents come for their UIs. The tools get cheaper every month.