According to Woot, I've been a member since Wednesday, July 27, 2005, and in those 7,694 days of membership, I've never been able to score a bag of crap. Until now!

If you don't know what Woot is, it's an old deals site that was purchased by Amazon at some point, but is still around and selling stuff. One of my favorite purchases I ever made at Woot was a 3 pack of Philips Powersquids for $15 in 2008, which I still use to this day!

Woot would periodically offer this thing called a bag (or box?) of crap which would be a random assortment of things that they probably couldn't sell or just had lying around. Back in the day people would get things like LCD TVs and cool shit like that. They might also just come with literal crap. The bags of crap go for $9.99 which might be a steal if you got a TV! Now that Amazon owns Woot, the items probably lean more towards the crap part but they're still probably worth more than $10 total.

Today I got a notification that a Woot-off was happening. The Woot-off is a fairly regular occurrence of flash "deals" where they sell something until it runs out, then another thing takes its place. Every once in a while they'll throw a bag of crap in there, but it'll sell out within seconds.

I've tried lots of different ways to get bags of crap in the past, but they mostly involved spamming reload manually, or using a change detection extension in my browser (the one that plays David Bowie's Changes as an alert sound effect) or relying on the Woot app's push notifications, which are severely delayed. To be honest, I never cared enough about getting the bag of crap to really commit to it.

But today was different. I could feel it. I've been trying to solve all of my automatable problems using AI, so I figured why not solve this one, too? After all, most of the people who get bags of crap these days are probably using bots anyway, so why limit myself to the slow, organic processes of my human physiology? So I had Codex write a bag of crap bot for me.

The funny thing is that while I was prompting Codex on how to make a bag of crap bot, I was just manually reloading Woot while waiting for updates. I've been using GPT 5.6 Luna on Max for a while since it's super cheap now (in usage, I'm using the Plus plan) and pretty darn capable. But running it on Max means it thinks a lot before doing stuff. So I was filling the time by reloading Woot.

You can probably guess what happened. While I was waiting for Codex to finish up an optimization (I noticed that I was getting some 504s when I reloaded too quickly manually), the Bag of Crap went online! I quickly added it to my cart, and while I was thrown into the Vestibule of Patience (OG Wooters know what I'm talking about here), I was surprisingly forwarded to the shopping cart page where I could choose a payment method and make my purchase!

So somewhat ironically, I was finally able to order my bag of crap after more than 20 years, just before finishing a bot to do it for me. Maybe I'll make another post to show off all my crap once I get it. I hope it comes soon!