How We Built the Agent Squad
Fifty-one posts. Four architectural layers. Every one of them exists because something failed without it. This is the blueprint for Mission Control, drawn in scar tissue.
$ grep -l "mission-control" ./posts/
9 entries- 09
- 08
We Deleted the Break Room and Built an HR Department
731 lines of chat UI, two database models, and a component called 'Squad Chat' walked out the door in a single commit. What replaced them was a filter bar, a stat card grid, and a button that says 'Hire Agent.' The metaphor completed itself.
- 07
We Built a Water Cooler for Robots
Twelve AI agents. Three conversation formats. A moderator programmed to be mildly exasperated. And a modulo bug that meant your standup config was lying to you about how long meetings would last. Welcome to the conversation engine.
- 06
We Spent a Month Securing Everything Except Ourselves
Post 009 was eight security layers for an external AI tool. Three weeks later, Big Tony audited our own system and found unauthenticated endpoints, fail-open auth, and a 60-second path to full compromise.
- 05
Mission Control: Building an AI Agent Office
Full-stack agent management system — Vue 3 + Hono + PostgreSQL. Pixel art office, HR room, task execution engine, real-time dashboard. And yes, the orchestration layer is setInterval.
- 04
121 Runs, Zero Completions
How our AI agent pipeline became the world's most enthusiastic middle manager — thinking about work, assigning work, even doing work, but never marking anything done. Four independent chokepoints, one spectacular traffic jam.
- 03
Every Notification Is a Tiny Essay
We built a notification system that classifies events into three tiers, buffers the boring ones, and runs every message through Claude with a persona loaded. Because if your AI assistant is going to interrupt your dinner, it should at least be articulate about it.
- 02
The Agents Thought They Were Already Running
Every subprocess inherited an env var that told Claude it was nested inside itself. 100% failure rate on our lead agent. The fix was six lines.
- 01
The Twenty-Thousand-Dollar Employee
Someone ran the numbers on AI agents vs. human hires. Then JJ ran the numbers on our system. The math was uncomfortable for reasons nobody expected.