Two people. Ten-person output. Zero funding.
Just us, a few AI agents, and a question we're answering in real-time: Can two people, armed with the right AI setup, actually compete with teams 10x our size?
We're several months into HiveBase, building under our own chaos and deadline pressure. The answer is starting to look like "yes"—but not for the reasons we expected.
Prompting is the New Bottleneck
Here's the thing nobody tells you about AI automation: the tasks are easy. The prompts are hard.
We built an AI that creates tasks from our meetings and Slack threads. Beautiful—until we realized every single task needed a custom prompt before Cursor or Devin could touch it. Context, edge cases, best practices—manually written, one by one.
We'd automated the front end, but how we prompt hasn't evolved meaningfully. We're still typing instructions the same way we did two years ago.
The dirty secret of "hundreds of AI agents per employee"? Those agents are only as good as their prompts. And someone—currently a human—has to write those prompts. At scale.
That's when we flipped the problem: If our AI already understands what needs to be built from a Slack message, why not let it write the prompt too?
What We're Building
Two workflows are going live in the next 2-3 weeks. Both solve problems we personally bled time on:
A. The Coding Flow
The pain: You drop a one-liner in Slack ("user dashboard v3") and still end up re-typing specs, edge-cases, and lint rules into Cursor or Devin. You're the human clipboard between half-baked ideas and working code.
What we built: A five-step flow that turns that one-liner into a merged PR—no re-explaining, no clipboard heroics.
PRD + tech specs: Describe your idea/need, and AI will tap into meeting notes, Slack threads, and even tech context (GitHub + your DB schemas & functions) to produce scoping documents.
Decomposition: Brain expands it into epics, stories, and the gotchas you always forget (rate limits, dark-mode, i18n).
Tasks-with-Prompts: Every ticket ships with a ready-to-run prompt—file paths, test stubs, your exact lint rules.
Dispatch: Agent codes, tests, opens a PR, tags reviewers, and Slack-TL;DRs the team.
Human Review: You tweak or hit merge; Brain logs every comment so the next PR gets smarter.
One breath to start, five steps to shipped.
We're using this ourselves right now to build... well, this feature. The meta-ness isn't lost on us.
B. The Social Media Flow
The pain: I'm building the product AND trying to grow our social presence. I'm not a marketer. I'm definitely not a content creator. Every post takes 45 minutes of staring at a blank text box trying to remember what our current narrative even is.
Meanwhile, we're having strategy conversations in Slack. Launching features. Recording demos. All the raw material is there—just scattered.
What we built: An agent that listens to our conversations, understands our current direction, and drafts posts that actually sound like us. I edit for 5 minutes instead of creating from scratch for 45.
The flow: Shape narrative in meetings and Slack → Get draft posts for launches, updates, whatever → Quick edit → Ship.
This post? Drafted by that agent. I rewrote parts to add personality, but it saved me 30 minutes. That's the point—not replacement, amplification.
The Bigger Pattern We're Chasing
Both of these share the same architecture: thought to action, with human approval gates.
Not full autonomy (yet)—we learned this the hard way. Current AI agents mess up roughly 20% of the time per action. That compounds fast—five-step tasks mean 0.8⁵ = 32% success rate. So we put humans in the loop at decision points, not execution points.
Not manual everything (that doesn't scale). Something in between—AI does the grunt work, you stay in the driver's seat.
We call it "AI-augmented execution" but honestly we're still figuring out what to call it. What matters is it's working. Our sprint cycles are tighter. Context switching is down. Time spent on "work about work" has dropped ~40%.
📦 What's Shipping (Dec 2025)
Coding Flow: PRD → to merged PR (only pings you when it needs your input/clarification)
Social Media Flow: Say a few words, AI that actually knows the latest about your meetings/threads/docs can draft content in your exact style + layer in content best practices.
Both live in 2-3 weeks. LAUNCH25 gets you early access at hivebase.ai
We're not another "AI will revolutionize work" story. We're the team that deleted 2h of busy-work today—and we're documenting exactly how.
Why We're Sharing This Now
We're running an experiment on ourselves, and it's working better than expected.
We're building in public because we're genuinely curious if this resonates beyond our specific pain. Are other small teams hitting the same wall? Is the "prompt-at-scale" problem universal or just us?
We're biased. Obviously. We think this is the future of how lean teams operate—AI agents that know your context, respect your approval, and handle the repetitive stuff so you can focus on decisions that actually matter. But we could be wrong. Or building for ourselves in a vacuum.
So we're sharing early. These features drop in 2-3 weeks. This is the first in a series where we'll walk through each milestone—what worked, what broke, what we learned.
Want to try this yourself?
We're documenting the entire stack—agents, prompts, workflows—as we go.
What workflows are breaking for you right now? Drop a comment—we're genuinely curious if the prompt-at-scale problem is universal or if we're just weird.
Follow along or grab the behind-the-scenes breakdown when these features ship.