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I let an AI agent run a new secret social media account. Here's week one.

At this point, asking whether AI is useful isn’t relevant anymore. Everyone seems to use it in their daily life.

What I’m curious about now is whether AI can actually do meaningful creative work by itself.

The setup

So a week ago, I created new social media accounts on Threads, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter (X), and TikTok.

I didn’t tell anyone about it, so it’s an anonymous, faceless account. I’ll reveal the name after the experiment wraps up in a month. What I can say is that it’s an Indonesian news media account, packaged in a funny, entertaining format.

Then I spun up Claude Code on my VPS (on exe.dev) and connected it to a Discord server I created, using my claude-code-discord project.

Each platform gets its own channel, so the agent keeps separate context for making TikToks, Shorts, carousels, and for checking how each one performs.

Discord server with one channel per platform, plus channels for tracking performance
Discord server with one channel per platform, plus channels for tracking performance

Dropping X and Instagram

After three days, it was obvious that X and Instagram aren’t great places for a new account. Their algorithms just didn’t distribute the content I put out.

So I dropped them from the experiment and kept only TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Threads.

Results after one week

  • Threads: 119,788 views & 31,820 viewers (one post went viral out of nowhere)
  • YouTube Shorts: 10,298 views & 47.9 hours of watch time
  • TikTok: 12,400 views, 97.4% of them from the For You page
Threads insights, last 7 days: 119,788 views, 31,820 viewers, +15 net followers, 382 interactions
Threads insights, last 7 days: 119,788 views, 31,820 viewers, +15 net followers, 382 interactions
YouTube Studio, last 7 days: 10,298 views, 47.9 hours of watch time, +10 subscribers
YouTube Studio, last 7 days: 10,298 views, 47.9 hours of watch time, +10 subscribers
TikTok analytics, last 7 days: 12.4K video views, 97.4% from the For You page
TikTok analytics, last 7 days: 12.4K video views, 97.4% from the For You page

Takeaways about AI

Today’s AI is really good at making memes, given the right tools. I pointed Claude Code to my meme editor, memegenscript.com, and it could easily pick the most suitable meme. I was both surprised and laughing at some of the content it made!

AI is now very capable of researching ideas and creating image and even video content. It just uses Playwright to capture HTML it built itself. It can mix audio and voiceover too, with the help of ffmpeg. There were some mild issues like text positioning, but it fixed those after a few prompts.

Takeaways about social media

YouTube Shorts is the best platform for beginners. Not the most views, but the most consistent. It got 1,000 to 2,000 views every single day, no crazy spikes, no dead days. Its algorithm just keeps distributing your content.

Threads is also great, but it’s hit-or-miss. Political news is more likely to go viral. I guess that’s just the nature of its algorithm.

TikTok is pretty good too. It gives a good number of views. Carousel image posts can be hit-or-miss though. One of mine beat 90% of other creators with the same follower count.

I’ll keep running this experiment until day 30. Stay tuned for more learnings!