How to build a 1-person AI company that:

- Runs locally
- 100% open-source
- No human employees, all agents
- Real-time collaboration via email

Multi-agent orchestration is not new. Plenty of frameworks already let agents hand off tasks, run in parallel, and talk to each other.

So the interesting question is not whether agents can collaborate. It is what structure you use to make them collaborate.

The common approach is to wire a graph of nodes and edges and reason about the plumbing yourself. It works, but you are learning a new abstraction just to describe who does what.

There is a coordination structure we have trusted for a hundred years already: an organization.

Every company runs the same way. People have roles, roles have reporting lines, and work moves up and down that chart without anyone relaying each message by hand.

Map that onto agents and the whole thing gets intuitive. You lay out an org chart, each agent fills one role, you talk to the person at the top, and the org sorts out the work between them.

You already know how a company works, so you already know how to run one here. There is no new abstraction to learn.

That is exactly what Alook does. Each agent is a live Claude Code or OpenCode session with a defined role, a reporting line, and its own email inbox.

The agents coordinate over email, the same way a team would. And it all runs locally through a runtime on your own machine, so nothing leaves your setup.

You bring your own agent too. Claude Code and Codex both work, and if you would rather stay fully open source and local, OpenCode works the same way.

To show how this feels in practice, I set up three agents as a small sales team.

Vi is the one I talk to. I hand Vi a goal, and Vi routes the work down the chart.

Neile runs prospect research. Vi passes the target criteria, and Neile reports back a ranked list of names, roles, and companies, each with a suggested angle and a confidence score.

Lliane runs outreach. Vi hands over the messaging angle and follow-up cadence, and Lliane reports back on emails sent, responses received, and any deal that needs escalation.

I never relay a message between them. Neile and Lliane report to Vi, and Vi updates me in one place.

The whole thing is open source and self-hosted, so it runs on your machine with your own agents. Give the repo a star if you want to follow where it goes: https://github.com/alookai/alook

I also wrote a full walkthrough on building your own AI company with it, from a blank org chart to a running job. The article is quoted below.

Cheers! :)