Claude Code powers a one-person firm's back office

The build started in April, before the June 2026 business-opening filing, because the founder found that non-core work — picking a trade name, filing, deciding on invoice registration, opening a business account, making a logo — was heavier than expected and had to be re-researched each time. The first version was one commit and 487 lines of Markdown; the finished shape came after 14 commits, and most changes were responses to problems that showed up in operation.

Those problems mostly concerned trust and continuity. To check research, he added a review mode that verifies existing reports on three axes — factual sourcing, logical leaps, and missed alternatives — and runs it in a context separate from the agent that did the research. To stop decisions vanishing between sessions, he created the state directory and a sixth flow step so the main agent records before ending a turn. When rules alone were not enough, he added a Stop hook that calls a second model to send back turns with missing records, written so that ambiguous cases pass through to avoid annoying reversals.

A drive migration in August broke absolute paths everywhere — including references to state/company.md in all six department definitions, which failed silently so agents worked without their premises. He removed absolute paths entirely, leaving symbolic links as the only place the real location is known, and unified Python execution on uv after dependencies in /tmp disappeared. The remaining friction is that the state files keep growing and there is still no check that symbolic links resolve at startup, so whether this stays a one-person company or needs reorganizing likely hinges on how he splits and prunes those files.