Inspiration

At the kick-off event, we got talking about the DAO and the current pace of AI innovation. It felt like we were at the frontier building tomorrow, but the DAO and its members weren't all up to speed. Inertia is our attempt to gather the organization's data, contributions and volunteers in one place and give everyone a leg up, so we can lead the charge in Fort Worth.

The name comes from physics: an object at rest stays at rest. Organizations work the same way. Inertia is the push that keeps them moving.

What it does

At its core, Inertia is an easy-to-digest home feed that helps members of an organization get up to speed and stay on the same page. There are no complicated repos or security headaches. It's a self-hosted, agent-native layer that sits on top of an organization's data. Paperclip coordinates the work, and Buzz carries identity and puts agents and people on equal footing. Together they let every member of an organization stay aware and contribute to its goals.

Funding is our first workflow. A team of agents works through the grant pipeline:

Alpha finds opportunities from more than 1,400 saved grant records.
A Coordinator ranks the strongest ones and hands each off as its own case.
Beta agents research each case and write drafts grounded in the organization's own knowledge, with citations.
Charlie independently reviews the sources and sends corrections back when something's off.

Members see all of this in the app's feed, Agents view and Funding view. They can also claim tasks themselves, just like an agent would. Every decision that matters, such as approving or submitting an application, stays with a person.

How we built it

Conversation → concept → Claude + Claude Design → ported our existing working repos (Paperclip plugin, grant finder, member app) → coordinated development and integration → coded across an agentic team (Codex and Claude Code) → deployed to a VPS → set up security (Cloudflare Access plus app sign-in) → shipped.

In eight days, that came to more than 400 commits and about 150 pull requests. The stack is TypeScript, React and PostgreSQL, with Paperclip as the system of record.

Challenges we ran into

There's a learning curve when a team of agents talks directly to a novice developer who doesn't know the "best practices." The agents were careful to separate "merged," "deployed" and "approved," and learning why that matters was part of the hackathon for us. We also hit real limits, like Paperclip's cap on how many sub-tasks one task can have. We had to rethink how the Coordinator hands out work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coordinating development pipelines across two teams and two systems. Working alongside another agentic developer is powerful: the whole adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. We're also proud that agents produced a real, cited grant draft that a person read and judged good enough to build on.

What we learned

Agentic development has reached the point where pretty much any app is an agentic system building itself. The developer's role has shifted toward capturing insight into real-world problems, and deciding what's true and what's ready. The technical side is mostly handled, or will sort itself out.

What's next for Inertia

Close the live loop between Paperclip and Buzz so members can pick up and finish work right from chat.
Bring meeting recordings and notes in automatically and turn them into follow-up tasks.
Let organizations other than FWTX connect their own sources and start from a blank slate.
Add governance votes where an organization's rules call for them before an application goes out.