Agency HQ.
Developers needed a lightweight, observable environment to prototype multi-agent behaviour, without heavy infrastructure or vendor lock-in.
Why this needed building.
Most multi-agent frameworks feel like infrastructure projects, lots of config, lots of abstraction, very little intuition about what's actually happening inside. For developers and curious builders experimenting with agent dynamics, there was no lightweight environment to watch agents interact, negotiate, and make decisions in real time.
We wanted to build something you could drop onto a machine, run locally, and immediately see something interesting happen.
How we built it.
We took a left turn on the obvious path. Instead of another dashboard, we built a pixel-art office simulation. Eleven AI agents with distinct roles, a CEO, a developer, a designer, a researcher, a few more, moving around a 2D office, meeting in rooms, sending messages, making decisions. Each agent has a personality, a goal, and a memory of its interactions.
The visual metaphor does most of the explaining. You don't need documentation to understand what's happening, you can see it. An agent walks into a room. Another agent is already there. They have a conversation. The outcome affects what both of them do next. It's a multi-agent system disguised as a game.
Agency HQ is open source, free to run locally, and has been picked up as a reference implementation by developers learning multi-agent patterns. It's also the most fun thing we've ever shipped.
"Abstract systems get legible the moment you give them a physical space to live in."Enjin Studio