Bots Are Hot (1996)
As a teenager I ran a pretty high margin business operating botting software for a popular MMORPG. Bots would autonomously play characters in the game in order to &quot;farm&quot; items that could be sold to other players in the game. Virtual currency could then be transferred over a &quot;black market&quot; forum, usually with paypal as a medium. Just to be clear all this was legal, it merely took on the visage of &quot;illegal&quot; because it violated the TOS of the game and could you your in-game character(s) banned.<p>The software was written by mostly teenagers and by all modern metrics was absolutely atrocious. It required constant maintenance, crashed all the time, and was riddled with bugs that would reveal your character as a bot and get it banned. But the exchange value for the virtual currency  was so high it didn&#x27;t matter, I was still making hand over fist.<p>I didn&#x27;t write any of the software I used at the time but it&#x27;s a pretty frequent daydream of mine imagining the literal millions of dollars I could of made were I able to go back and re-write that software knowing everything about software development I know now.<p>The beauty of bots is that they do not augment the productivity of the user like most software, they replace it with something that is a consistant multiplier better.