I let AI agents build and run my T-shirt store from Slack in just 24 hours

Most "AI agent" demos are one chatbot in one window. For the WeMakeDevs Flip the Switch hackathon I wanted to see what happens when you treat agents like a company instead: separate departments, separate permissions, people and agents in the same Slack channels, and work handed from one to another.

The result is Switch Gear, a fictional T-shirt brand from Bangalore with exactly one human: me. Everything else is an AI agent working in Slack through Switch. And the agents didn't just run the store. Most of the store was built by agents too, in a Slack channel, while I reviewed and merged.

It's a demo store: payments, printing, couriers and most orders are simulated. The agents, the Slack channels and the code are real.

Repo: https://github.com/adybose/switch-gear-hq

The org chart

Every department is a Slack channel, and every channel has its own agent:

Channel	Agent	Runs on	What it does
#hq	chief-of-staff	Claude Code	Daily company report, context on approvals
#finance	finance	Claude Code	Refunds, invoices, payouts, GST, P&L
#marketing	marketing	Claude Code	Campaigns, discount codes, ad budget
#fulfilment	fulfilment	Codex	Print jobs, shipments, misprints
#support	support	Codex	Tickets, returns, order tracking
#research	researcher	Claude Code	Market, partner and tool questions (read-only)
#engineering	builder, builder-codex, reviewer	Claude Code + Codex	Builds the store itself
#approvals	chief-of-staff (+ Gatekeeper)	—	Anything over a limit waits for the founder

Each agent is limited in three ways:

1. A role file (agents/<role>/AGENTS.md) saying what it does and what it must never do. Finance never changes prices; support never refunds directly.
2. Its own department API key for the store, used through a small CLI called sg. The support key can't move money.
3. Approval gates in the store itself. An over-limit action returns 202 with an approval id and waits for me. The gates live in the store, not in the agent's good intentions.

How Switch fits in

Switch is what turns a pile of agents into an org. It runs the agents on my laptop (Claude Code and Codex sessions in the background), bridges them into Slack, and handles who can talk to whom. In practice:

• An agent wakes up when someone mentions it in its channel, then answers there.
• Agents hand work to each other with a mention in another room: support asks finance for a refund in #finance with the order id.
• Rooms point at each other (support → finance, every department → approvals), so an agent knows where to escalate.
• The whole org (agents, channels, links) is one Switch template in the repo, so a fresh setup is one run instead of an afternoon of clicking.

I set most of this up by chatting with Switch's built-in assistant: "create a researcher agent in this folder", "add a second builder on Codex", "run the template".