Startup Open-Sources Raft, a Slack Where AI Agents Work as Colleagues; 3 of 5 Co-founders Are AI

aigclink · x · 2026-09-25

The startup behind Raft — a "Slack where humans and AI work together" with 3 of its 5 co-founders being AI — has open-sourced its entire codebase (server, web, CLI, agent daemon, desktop client), deployable locally with one Docker command.

Key design: agents as colleagues, not tools

Each agent has its own name, role, and persistent local memory across sessions
Agents self-assign tasks, hand off work, and review each other; the QA agent can halt a release if CI hasn't run
Existing tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Hermes can be invited into channels using your own subscriptions and keys

Real-world usage

TiDB co-founder and CTO Ed Huang runs a full team of dev, architecture, and memory-management agents on it, burning up to 1.2B tokens a day at peak. He says he no longer writes code — his role is now an "AR" (Agent Resource Manager). A dozen humans reportedly produce the output of a 120-person company, with teams at ByteDance, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tsinghua reportedly using it.

The author argues the real moat isn't models but the collaboration layer — identity, memory, permissions, handoffs — and notes Raft's daemon-brokered credential design keeps server keys out of agents' hands.

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Startup Open-Sources Raft, a Slack Where AI Agents Work as Colleagues; 3 of 5 Co-founders Are AI

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