Show HN: Self-hosted company OS, Claude Code and Codex agents in departments

I have been playing with something similar and I see these types of projects all the time. My criticism of things like this is that they seem to rely heavily on the ~*~magic~*~ of LLMs to do everything and try to paper over gaps with major hand-waving on everything beyond "agents do everything" when in reality, the most critical part is agents NOT doing much and relying on 'boring' deterministic backbones in an automatic fashion.

A good version of this kind of system would be pushing as much LLM magic out of the core and having solid internal tools that personas/agents _happen_ to have access to. So rather than having one big messy ball of ~*~magic~*~ where it burns tokens trying to invent strategy and keep track of every thread via memory, you have a few personas that manage specific tools to gather information about the world and outlay of the company. Inside those specific tools/platforms, you can have ~*~magic~*~ to do things deterministic code can't while still keeping the magic halves of CMO and copywriter separated by a deterministic concern-specific platform so structure is consistent and enforced by strongly typed code.

The model I think many go after is a strong monolith when the idealized 'autonomous company', in my opinion, should be decentralized and largely tool-driven rather than agent-driven along with not re-inventing the wheel / pushing third-party integrations out to the edge or later in the roadmap. It's a lot easier and better to just write an MCP against Linear than re-inventing the wheel on a todo app basically.

Let me know if that is your design because whenever I look at stuff like this, especially the broad promises of an autonomous company, all I can think about is just a slop factory that produces even worse slop the longer you run it due to agents running away and inventing new things.

I agree with your points, and that is how it is built. The backbone in OtoDock is deterministic code, the model only runs inside a session. Schedules are cron, triggers are webhooks, permissions are a fail closed gate per tool, cost limits are set per user and per agent, and delegation between agents is configured from the admin and the agent managers, an agent cannot change any of that. Agents only see the tools and skills their manager assigned and the integrations are MCPs against existing tools, GitHub, Notion, Home Assistant, Prometheus. Memory is plain markdown files you can read and edit.

So I agree that the company should be tool driven. OtoDock is the home of the agents, and from there they connect to and control the company tools

In addition the agents are distributed at the execution level, the control plane and dashboard run on the server but the agents can also run on whatever machine you pair, with their files synced.

Looks great. I didn't like the paperclip system with my main issue being that agents would go over daily budgets all too often. Looking forward to giving this a try.

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