A food-delivery company running agents across engineering, support and data

This client of Hilo is a food-delivery company operating in Europe, with a team of about a dozen people. Orders, couriers, restaurants, customers — the operational surface of a marketplace, run by a group small enough that everyone does several jobs.

Companies at that size automate for a specific reason: not to reduce headcount, but because the work outgrows the people faster than hiring can fix. A dozen people carrying the load of thirty is the normal state, and the parts that suffer first are the ones nobody owns — reporting, follow-up, the weekly things that matter but never shout.

A fleet gives those things an owner.

The fleet

An engineering agent. Lives close to the codebase: reviews, drafts fixes, keeps documentation honest, and picks up the maintenance that never reaches the top of a sprint.

A support agent. Reads incoming issues, answers what is already answered, routes the rest with the context attached — so an engineer starts from a diagnosis instead of a one-line complaint.

A data agent. Owns the recurring analysis. Retention, funnel, cohort behaviour — delivered on a schedule rather than when someone finally has an afternoon.

An admin agent. Invoices, compliance dates, the small obligations that cost nothing to do and a great deal to miss.

A monitor. Watches the scheduled work and raises a flag when a job fails, because the failure mode of automation is silence, not error.

How the work moves

Agents are members of the same workspace as the team. An engineer mentions the engineering agent in a thread and the context is already there. The support agent hands a diagnosed issue to the engineering agent by name. The data agent’s weekly analysis lands as a document people can comment on line by line, not as a message that scrolls away.

The discipline that makes it work is written into the agents, not enforced by people. Each one knows what it may decide alone, what it must escalate, and what it may never do — never a production write, never an outbound message to a customer without a human approving it.

What stays human

Product decisions. Anything customer-facing. Anything that touches production. Anything irreversible.

Why it runs on their own infrastructure

The codebase, the customer conversations, the metrics — that is the company. A startup that hands all three to a third-party cloud to get some automation has traded the wrong asset.

Agent runtimes and the fleet record live on the team’s own machine. Model calls go directly to the provider the team chooses. Hilo holds the hosted door without keeping a durable copy of what the agents know.