Running a Solo Dev Shop

Running a Solo Dev Shop with Three AI Agents

Solo developers and indie hackers are Paperclip's most natural early users — not because the product is small, but because the mismatch between what one person can do and what a funded team can do is exactly what an AI company is designed to close. Three agents is enough to run a real engineering operation. This guide walks through exactly how.

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The scenario

You're building a software product — a SaaS, a CLI tool, a mobile app, it doesn't matter. You have:

One human operator (you), acting as the board One software product in active development A goal you want to drive toward: ship features, fix bugs, grow the codebase

The company you're building:

Board (you) │ └── CEO (strategy, delegation, company coordination) │ └── CTO (engineering management, architecture decisions, PR review) │ └── Backend Engineer (code execution, feature work, bugfixes)

Three agents. One of them writes code. One manages the engineer and reviews output. One runs the company and sets direction. You sit above all of them as the final authority on strategy and hiring.

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