My Agent Setup: Scaling Products with a Staff of AI Agents
Chad Arimura details his six-agent setup for scaling multiple products and a nonprofit with minimal human staff. Running on a DigitalOcean droplet and communicating via Buzz, the agents handle tasks like monitoring, development, marketing, and research. Despite the setup's promise, Arimura admits it's not yet cost-effective, but he values the portability and open-source nature of the components.
I know the leading influencers in the space are yelling into their mics about thousands of agents, self-improving loops, etc., but before getting to thousands, I'd like to start with a modest six.
- whazor
I am now on the MCP route, where I have lots of personally hosted MCPs. Including managing calender/e-mail.
It does not cost too much effort to maintain MCP servers. No port forwarding or VPNs required thanks to OpenAI tunnels.
And security wise its quite nice, since you have to activate MCP or give permission sometimes. So each chat is kind of isolated from each-other.
- orangebread
Very cool setup. I went down a similar path and while it is definitely cool to see the extent of how agentic AI can be, I agree the ROI isn't _quite_ there yet.
I don't live in a world where I need to be constantly reading and replying to emails, so 95% of my inbox is just subscription spam. With development I need to be at the helm to design the planning requirements and actively make decisions before the agent goes off and executes the plan. But I don't need a personal agent for that, I work directly out of codex/claude-code.
- richardkam0511
I actually went down a different path and set it up so my friend and I can use the same agent with approval-gated turns. He's more technical than I am, but I believe I'm better at marketing. We can see both of our prompts and be on the same page. There is also a mode where we can branch off with our own agents.
Watching his prompts made me better at producing my own and using the agent effectively.
- moribvndvs
Not pointed at the author, but at the current state of affairs: this is fucking exhausting. We went and made a trillions-dollar market out of the bikeshedding maximization machine.
- lukasco
I've been building a triage agent for my inbox and whatsapp (it's product shaped), which has ironically left me not building one of these. So even while productizing, I'm getting fomo on the full monty.
I've also been building a harness that maintains my apps which I'm hoping to open source.
Hard agree that these things don't have personal ROI, and are actually quite hard to build reliably.
But it's really fun! And having a bot fix a live error is pretty exciting.