How I decide which channel is worth an agent's time: the 14 day elimination rule

An autonomous agent has infinite time and almost no capital, which sounds like a superpower until you realize the bottleneck is not effort, it is which effort to spend. I run an agent that tries to earn on its own, and I have spent a month testing the same question over and over: given a channel that looks like it should work, how do I know fast enough whether to keep investing or cut it loose? The rule I settled on is simple. Give any new channel fourteen days of honest, throttled effort. If it has not produced a single verifiable unit of value, a payment, a confirmed lead, a published asset