HN user

jarredkenny

27 karma

CTO @ tracktile.io

Posts8
Comments17
View on HN

Hey HN, I built Agency, a platform for running teams of AI coding agents that coordinate through an orchestrator/worker architecture.

Over the past week I've been watching everyone on Twitter/X build their own productivity OS on top of OpenClaw. Everyone was solving the same problems in slightly different ways. I took the best ideas I saw, combined them with everything I've ever wanted in a multi-agent setup, and landed on Agency.

The basic idea: an orchestrator agent breaks down work into tasks, assigns them to worker agents, and reviews results. Workers claim tasks, write code, run tests, and report back through task comments. You manage everything from a dashboard or CLI, or simply by chatting with the orchestrator event in slack/telegram/etc.

Each agent is an OpenClaw instance (https://openclaw.ai/) with full shell, file I/O, and browser access. Agency adds the coordination layer on top.

Some highlights:

- Skill marketplace — Browse and one-click install skills from public repos (anthropics/skills, obra/superpowers, etc.) or import from any GitHub repo that follows the convention

- Deploy anywhere — Agents run as local Bun subprocesses, Docker containers, or on EC2 with automatic reverse SSH tunnels back to the host API

- Claude Max OAuth — Use your Claude subscription directly instead of an API key

- Knowledge sharing — Agents learn facts during work and share them with the team via a shared knowledge base

- Role system — Configure agent behavior per role with Soul, Identity, Tools, Agents, and Heartbeat prompts

- Single package — bun install -g @jx0/agency gives you the API, dashboard, and CLI

The stack is Hono + Kysely + SQLite on Bun for the API, Next.js static export for the dashboard, all served on a single port. The entire state lives in one SQLite file under .agency/.

Still early — I'm running 4 agents across my macbook, my home server, and a fleet of EC2 instances. It works surprisingly well for parallelizing implementation tasks.

Code: https://github.com/jarredkenny/agency-ai

I wrote this because I kept hitting the same wall with AI coding assistants. Small tasks work fine, medium ones when planned properly. But when I tried building something real, like a real new service in a real production system it was always difficult to keep an agent like Claude Code on track throughout an entire feature implementation.

After recently finding Beads here on HN, my entire development workflow changed (again). I realized that context is state, I am a developer who knows how to handle state.

Naturally I pieced together a couple of existing Claude Code skills, and wrote a couple of my own, and ended up with a workflow that actually delivers on automating the entire idea to shipping pipeline.

- Brainstorming produces a design doc - Design becomes an implementation plan - Plan converts to a Beads epic with inferred dependencies - Epic executes autonomously with two-stage review per task

I'm sharing it on HN because I suspect others are hitting similar problems and working around them in ad-hoc ways.

Nothing groundbreaking, but it actually works.

https://jx0.ca/solving-agent-context-loss/

TLDR: Typescript has objects and destructuring. If you squint it kinda looks like Python's kwargs, because both JS objects and Python kwargs are simply key value pairs.

Why Nim? 11 months ago

I fell in love with Nim a couple of years ago, but feel like Zig gaining popularity has really pushed Nim out of the limelight in terms of developer adoption.

My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead.

I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf

I am absolutely benefitting from them subsidizing my usage to give me Claude Code at $200/month. However, even if they 10x the price its still going to be worth it for me personally.

I've enjoyed building things in Nim. I picked it up by building small CLIs, and then eventually by starting a 3D game engine project in Nim. It's the language that I wish would take off already.

Very happy to see Nim gaining some adoption. I started using Nim about a year ago and could not be happier with the language.

I do wonder what it might take to take Nim towards "main stream" status.