Hand Claude Code a website and an ad budget to run on its own
A web developer gave Claude Code a baseline site, ad accounts with a budget, and scraping tools, and lets it make marketing decisions every four hours.
Research · Do this yourself
Use AI to explore free public science data, like telescope readings.
✅ He reports a candidate he believes nobody had catalogued.
Who it’s for
Students, hobbyists and curious learners.
Adapt it to your industry
- Real estate: compare neighborhoods using public data
- Restaurant: summarize what reviews say about you and nearby competitors
- Consultant: build a short brief on a client’s market before the first call
Step by step
- Open ChatGPT, Claude or Grok and start a new chat (turn on web search or “deep research” if your plan has it).
- Write down the exact question you need answered and what a good answer looks like (a table, a one-page memo, a list).
- Paste the prompt below and add your question.
- Ask it to list every source it used with links, then open 2–3 of them to check they say what it claims.
- Ask for the result in the format you need, for example a table you can paste into Google Sheets.
- Save the prompt so you can re-run the same research next week.
Ready-to-copy prompt
Download public light curves for [target list], search for periodic transit dips, and show me each candidate with the plot and false-positive checks.Start with AI
Opens the AI with this guide and the prompt filled in.
- Cost
- $0–20/month (free tiers or one AI plan)Our estimate
- Time
- 2–6 weeksOur estimate
How to make money from it
Pricing idea: Offer short research briefs at a fixed price per report (for example $100–500), or a monthly retainer for a weekly update.
Finding your first 10 customers
- Make one free sample report on a topic your target customers care about and share it.
- Send it directly to 20 people in that field with a one-line note.
- Ask anyone who replies what they would pay for a monthly version.
Ideas, not promises. Results vary.
Details: source, numbers and tags
What they did
The poster used Claude Code to pull and analyze public astronomy data and look for a planet signal.
How it went
He reports a candidate he believes nobody had catalogued. That is a claim, not a confirmed discovery.
Worth knowing
Candidates need professional follow-up; HN commenters debated it.
- Difficulty
- AdvancedOur rating
- Time to build
- Not reportedOur estimate
- Monthly cost
- Not reported
- Revenue
- Not reportedWe only show revenue the source states
- Engagement
- 301 HN points132 comments · fetched Oct 15, 2026
Original builder recipe
- Claude Code
- Public telescope data
- Python
- Define the question and success criteria.
- Let agents search, run or summarize in parallel.
- Verify key results yourself.
- Write up findings with sources.
Tags
Read the original
- Hacker News: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002665 ↗ (opens in new tab) Oct 8, 2026 · 301 points, 132 comments (fetched 2026-10-15)
- Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/mbe5IY2LF9 ↗ (opens in new tab) Oct 8, 2026
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