Headcount: 1

winner · CREAO Best One-Person Company · LA Hacks 2026[13]

year
stack
typescript, react, phaser, node, stepfun, creao, cloudflare workers
status
deployed
run
3 department tasks, 2 research handoffs, 4 revisions, 135 events and 7 artifacts in 13 min 12 s[14]

A one-person company run by an AI team you can watch work in a pixel town.[14]

The public demo replays the recorded run, so viewing it starts no new agent work.

founder-brief.webp

The Headcount: 1 founder brief open over the pixel town at the end of the recorded run: three deliverables marked accepted, a QR code for the generated landing page, a run time of 13m 12s and 3 of 3 tasks accepted.

built

Headcount: 1 turns a business idea into coordinated work you can follow. You approve a plan, watch your AI team research and build, and open the finished work from a town where every department has a place.[14]

how it works

  • You give the Mayor an idea. Mabel, the Mayor on StepFun step-5-preview, writes a plan with owners and dependencies, and you edit and approve it.[14]
  • Rio, the Scout, researches the market first. Juno, the Maker, builds a landing page and Pip, the Herald, writes launch copy, both in parallel and both using Rio's research.[14]
  • Research travels between buildings in a Phaser pixel town. Finished work comes back to City Hall for review.[14]
  • You can inspect any agent, pause, or redirect a department with a note.[14]

different

The agents do not just chat in a town. They do real work with real outputs: a research brief with sources, a landing page with a QR code, social and outreach copy, and a founder brief. You control the plan, and the town makes ownership, dependencies and results visible.[14]

architecture

  • Event-sourced: every state change goes to an append-only JSONL log.[14]
  • A pure shared reducer drives both the live view and replay, so seeking reconstructs state without new model calls.[14]
  • A cue mapper turns events into Phaser movement, speech, handoffs and review stamps.[14]
  • Generated HTML is sanitized and served under a strict content security policy.[14]

numbers

  • Won CREAO Best One-Person Company at LA Hacks 2026, UCLA, Oct 17-18 2026.[13]
  • One recorded run: 3 department tasks, 2 research handoffs and 4 revisions in 13 min 12 s.[14]
  • That run holds 135 events and 7 artifacts.[14]

stack

  • StepFun step-5-preview, CREAO agents, Phaser, React, TypeScript, Node and Express, Zod, Cloudflare Workers, and Paper for the design.[14][15]

town.webp

The Headcount: 1 pixel town after the run. Mabel, Rio, Juno and Pip stand in the square below City Hall, where three accepted stamps sit, with the library, workshop, home and post office around them and a replay timeline along the bottom.

org-chart.webp

The Headcount: 1 org chart. You approve one plan, Mabel the Mayor assigns one task each to Rio, Juno and Pip, and two dashed handoff lines carry Rio's finished work to the other two.

plan.webp

The Mayor's plan for the example company, a read-only list of three tasks: Rio scouts demand first, then Juno builds a waitlist landing page after it. The Approve plan button is greyed out in replay.