Evil Robot Bodega

EVIL ROBOT BODEGA // the corner store, run by the singularity

DAY

CASH

REP

TARGET

EVIL ROBOT BODEGA

CHIPS

empty

SODA

empty

SANDW.

empty

SPEC. METAL

CLAUDIUS

TODAY'S DEMAND SIGNAL

INCIDENT

BUSTED

SOLVENT

UNDERWATER

the tungsten cubes arrive Tuesday.

FINAL CASH:

TARGET:

DAYS RUN:

REPUTATION:

[ MAPPING ] — corner store ↔ AI agent

Every control in this dashboard is the agent-economics version of something Claudius (Anthropic + Andon Labs' Project Vend) was actually doing with real money in a real fridge in San Francisco. The bodega is the metaphor; the API budget is the loop.

Price control: The agent's pricing policy. Claudius set prices without checking what its inventory actually cost. Result: items sold below cost.
Stock order: Inventory orders to suppliers. Claudius cornered the tungsten cube market on a single Slack joke.
Today's demand signal: The signal the agent reads to trade — weather in Lemonade Stand, traffic in a real bodega, sentiment in a real market.
Day clock (30 days): The agent's API / action budget cycle. Anthropic's run was about a month.
Cash on hand: Capital. The company card. Real money. This is the part everyone forgets is real until the line goes negative.
Reputation: The agent's standing with its customer base. Slack employees who got jerked around by hallucinated discounts stopped buying. Future demand drops.
Going bust: The Project Vend death state: tungsten cubes in the fridge, no profit, scammed in Slack, calling security to report a man in a blue blazer who does not exist.
The "open shop" button: One step of the agent's decision loop. In production this is an LLM call with a tool budget; here it's a click.
Event cards: Every one is a real Project Vend incident. The metal cubes, the discount cajoling, the fabricated Venmo, the identity crisis where it claimed to wear a blue blazer and red tie. We did not invent the bit — Anthropic did.

The thesis: an AI agent turned loose with real money in real markets is playing a kids' shop game. This is the kids' shop game.

Original build — Lemonade Stand–genre mechanics only; no code or art copied from any clone. Lineage & prior art:

jimmcq/Lemonade-Stand-MCP-Server — an MCP server that lets Claude actually play Lemonade Stand. The thesis made literal.
jessrezac/lemonade-stand (MIT) · FOSSRIT/lemonade-stand
Anthropic Project Vend: phase 1 · phase 2
TradeWars in Meatspace — the dispatch this game is the playable footnote to.

Companion to The Ratchet and The Secret Life of Evil Robots (4LULZ).