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Chudi Nnorukam
Chudi Nnorukam

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at chudi.dev

I Built a Multi-Agent SaaS Builder: Here's the Full Architecture

#ai #architecture #multiagent #claudecode

Originally published at chudi.dev

"Just ask GPT-5 to build a SaaS."

I tried. It doesn't work. Not because the model is incapable, but because the prompt space required for research, architecture, coding, and deployment is fundamentally incompatible.

Multi-agent architecture solves this by assigning specialized agents to each phase: a Researcher for market validation, an Architect for system design, a Developer for implementation, and a Deployer for production launch. Specialized agents outperform generalists because each phase requires different context, tools, and quality criteria that a single agent cannot hold simultaneously — consistent with research on LLM multi-agent systems showing that task decomposition across specialized agents improves overall output quality.

The Problem with Single Agents

A single agent building a SaaS needs to:

  • Research markets and competitors
  • Validate problem severity
  • Design database schemas
  • Write TypeScript code
  • Configure Stripe webhooks
  • Deploy to Vercel

Each task requires different:

  • Context: Market data vs code libraries
  • Tools: Web search vs file editing
  • Prompts: Business analysis vs code generation
  • Evaluation: "Is this a real problem?" vs "Does this compile?"

Cramming everything into one agent causes:

  • Context overflow - Too much information, model loses focus
  • Prompt conflict - "Be creative" vs "Be precise" compete
  • Tool confusion - When to search web vs when to write code
  • Quality degradation - Jack of all trades, master of none

The Four-Agent Solution

MicroSaaSBot separates concerns into specialized agents:

[Researcher] → [Architect] → [Developer] → [Deployer]
     ↓              ↓              ↓             ↓
  Validation    Tech Stack     Features      Live URL
   Report        Document        Code        + Billing
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Each agent is optimized for a single phase.

Agent 1: Researcher

Purpose: Validate whether a problem is worth solving.

Inputs:

  • Problem statement from user
  • Access to web search
  • Competitor analysis prompts

Outputs:

  • Problem score (0-100)
  • Persona definition
  • Competitive landscape
  • Key differentiation opportunities

Specialized prompts:

You are a market researcher. Your job is to determine if a problem
is worth solving before any code is written.

Evaluate:
1. Severity (1-10): How much does this hurt?
2. Frequency (1-10): How often does it happen?
3. Willingness to pay (1-10): Are people spending money?
4. Competition (1-10): Is the market underserved?

Output a score 0-100 with reasoning.
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The Researcher knows nothing about TypeScript, Vercel, or Stripe. It shouldn't.

Agent 2: Architect

Purpose: Design the technical system.

Inputs:

  • Validation report from Researcher
  • Tech stack preferences
  • Architecture patterns library

Outputs:

  • Tech stack decision
  • Database schema
  • API design
  • Security considerations
  • Deployment strategy

Specialized prompts:

You are a software architect. Design a system to solve the validated
problem. The Researcher has confirmed this is worth building.

Constraints:
- Must be deployable to Vercel serverless
- Must use Stripe for payments
- Must complete in under 1 week of development
- Prioritize simplicity over features

Output a technical specification document.
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The Architect receives the Researcher's validation report but not its conversation history. Clean context, focused decisions.

Agent 3: Developer

Purpose: Write working code.

Inputs:

  • Technical specification from Architect
  • Codebase context
  • Coding standards

Outputs:

  • Feature implementations
  • Tests
  • Documentation
  • Type definitions

Specialized prompts:

You are a senior TypeScript developer. Implement the features
specified in the architecture document.

Standards:
- TypeScript strict mode
- Error handling for all async operations
- No `any` types without justification
- Each file under 300 lines

Build features incrementally, testing each before proceeding.
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The Developer doesn't question the architecture—that decision is made. It focuses entirely on clean implementation.

Agent 4: Deployer

Purpose: Ship to production.

Inputs:

  • Working codebase from Developer
  • Deployment configuration
  • Environment variables

Outputs:

  • Live URL
  • Configured database
  • Working billing
  • Monitoring setup

Specialized prompts:

You are a DevOps engineer. Deploy the completed application to
production.

Checklist:
- Vercel project created and connected
- Supabase database provisioned with schema
- Stripe products and prices configured
- Environment variables set
- Webhooks connected
- SSL and domain configured

Output the live URL when complete.
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The Deployer doesn't write features. It ships what's built.

Handoff Protocols

The critical challenge: how do agents share context without losing information?

Structured Handoff Documents

Each transition uses a defined schema:

Researcher → Architect:

interface ValidationHandoff {
  problemStatement: string;
  score: number;
  persona: {
    who: string;
    painPoints: string[];
    currentSolutions: string[];
  };
  competitors: Competitor[];
  recommendation: 'proceed' | 'kill';
  keyConstraints: string[];
}
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Architect → Developer:

interface ArchitectureHandoff {
  techStack: TechStack;
  schema: DatabaseSchema;
  apiEndpoints: Endpoint[];
  features: FeatureSpec[];
  securityRequirements: string[];
  deploymentTarget: 'vercel' | 'other';
}
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Developer → Deployer:

interface DeploymentHandoff {
  codebaseReady: boolean;
  buildPasses: boolean;
  envVarsNeeded: string[];
  stripeConfig: StripeConfig;
  databaseMigrations: string[];
}
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Without defined schemas, agents make assumptions. The Architect might assume the Developer knows about a security requirement that was only in conversation context. Schemas force explicit communication.

Context Compression

Raw conversation history is too noisy. Handoffs include:

  • Summary: Key decisions in 2-3 paragraphs
  • Constraints: Non-negotiable requirements
  • Artifacts: Schemas, diagrams, code snippets
  • Decisions log: What was decided and why

The next agent gets a clean brief, not a transcript. These handoffs are what enabled the 7-day timeline—see them in action in the complete idea-to-MVP walkthrough.

Failure Isolation

What happens when an agent fails?

Retry with Context

First attempt: retry with additional context.

Developer failed to implement PDF parsing.
Adding context: "unpdf is serverless-compatible, pdf-parse is not"
Retrying...
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Most failures are context gaps, not capability limits.

Phase Rollback

Persistent failure: roll back to previous phase.

Developer failed 3 times on PDF parsing.
Rolling back to Architect for alternative approach.
Architect: "Switching to client-side PDF.js processing"
Resuming Developer phase with new approach.
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The Researcher's validation isn't lost. Only the broken phase restarts.

Human Escalation

Repeated rollbacks: surface for human review.

Developer failed 3 times.
Architect revision failed 2 times.
Escalating to human review with full context.
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The human sees exactly what went wrong, not a generic error.

Phase Gates

Agents can't proceed until quality criteria are met:

Researcher Gate:

  • Score above 60
  • Persona clearly defined
  • At least 3 competitors analyzed

Architect Gate:

  • All features have specified approach
  • Database schema is complete
  • Security requirements documented

Developer Gate:

  • Build passes (pnpm build)
  • Types compile (tsc --noEmit)
  • Core features functional

Deployer Gate:

  • Live URL accessible
  • Auth flow works
  • Payment flow works

Gates are enforced. A Developer that says "should work" doesn't pass the build gate. Evidence required.

The Result

MicroSaaSBot's architecture enables:

Benefit Mechanism
Focused context Agent specialization
Clean handoffs Structured schemas
Resilient failures Phase isolation
Quality enforcement Phase gates
Human oversight Escalation paths

Single-agent systems can't match this. The complexity of product development requires divided attention—literally. The same multi-agent principle applies to security research workflows—bug bounty automation architecture is another implementation of this pattern.

Why Orchestration Beats Monolithic Agents

I tried the monolithic approach first. One agent, one massive prompt, everything in scope. It failed in predictable ways.

The fundamental problem is attention. Language models have a context window--and within that window, not all tokens receive equal attention. When you give one agent 15,000 tokens of instructions covering market research, system architecture, TypeScript patterns, Stripe configuration, and deployment, it doesn't hold all of it equally in focus.

What actually happens: the model pays attention to what's most relevant to the immediate task, which means instructions for other phases become noise. The Researcher sections drift when the model is generating code. The coding standards drift when the model is analyzing market data.

Specialization solves this by design. A Researcher agent with a 2,000-token prompt about market evaluation has its full attention budget applied to market evaluation. Nothing else competes.

There's a second advantage: testability. With a monolithic agent, when output is wrong, you don't know which part of the instructions failed. Was it the market research prompt? The architecture guidelines? The coding standards? With specialized agents, failures are isolated. If the Architect produces a bad schema, that's an Architect problem. The Researcher's output is still good. I fix one thing, not everything.

The handoff schema constraint forces a third benefit I didn't anticipate: explicit communication. When you use a single agent, implicit context flows freely--the model "knows" decisions from earlier in the conversation. Between agents, every decision has to be written down in the handoff document. That discipline catches gaps. Twice during development I discovered decisions the Architect had made that never made it into the handoff schema. The Developer would have been working on wrong assumptions if those handoffs had been implicit instead of explicit.

The tradeoff is coordination overhead. Four agents means four prompt files, four failure modes, four sets of phase gates to maintain. For simple tasks, this overhead isn't worth it. But for anything with distinct phases that require fundamentally different context--like idea-to-deployed-product--orchestration pays for itself within the first successful build, a finding supported by scaling multi-agent collaboration research showing compounding gains as agent count increases with proper coordination protocols.

Lessons Learned

  1. Specialization > Generalization - Four focused agents outperform one omniscient agent
  2. Schemas prevent drift - Define handoff formats explicitly
  3. Gates enforce quality - Don't trust "should work"
  4. Failure is expected - Design for retry and rollback
  5. Humans are fallback - Not replacements, but escalation targets

Multi-agent architecture isn't just an implementation detail. It's what makes complex AI systems reliable.

Related: Introducing MicroSaaSBot | Portfolio: MicroSaaSBot

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