GitHub Copilot runs solo-company departments

João Pedro Silva Setas runs five software products as a solo founder. He built eight GitHub Copilot custom agents for operations, finance, marketing, accounting, legal review, strategy, technical decisions and system improvement. Each role lives in a Markdown agent file, with tool access and domain instructions.

A daily operations run checks Sentry, the sprint board, overdue recurring work and a shared knowledge graph. It then delegates work and produces a prioritized plan. Roles can consult one another when a task crosses domains, such as marketing claims needing legal review or pricing needing tax context. Call-chain tracking and a depth limit prevent endless consultations.

Setas reports more than 84 tweets and five DEV articles after two months, with marketing taking him less than an hour a week. He also reports no missed compliance deadlines, but just €6.09 in revenue against roughly €42 a month in hosting. Those figures describe his own business and do not establish that the agents made it profitable.

One useful failure was concurrent writes corrupting the JSONL knowledge graph. Setas forked the memory server to add serialization, atomic file writes and repair during loading. He retained strategic decisions and approved the Improver agent's proposed changes. Memory writes alone needed no approval. Protected instruction sections depended on agent compliance rather than machine enforcement. The case shows both the reported operational output and the infrastructure work required to keep several tool-using roles from damaging shared state.

Prompt
Suggested prompt (written by Agents In Use, not the author's)

Source: DEV Community · João Pedro Silva Setas