Introducing Nex Staff — built at RAISE Hackathon 2026

Solo founders wear every hat — product, marketing, content, research, coding, ops. Most can’t afford a real team. Generic AI chat helps in the moment, but it doesn’t feel like having people. You still wait, context-switch, and carry the mental load yourself.

At RAISE Hackathon 2026, Team Tihado is building Nex Staff to change that — and we’re having a great time doing it together.

The problem

Building alone is hard on morale. Same blank doc. Same stuck feature. No one to high-five when something ships. Over weeks and months, isolation turns into something worse than being busy: boredom and burnout.

Most AI products treat you like a power user in a terminal. Nex Staff treats you like a boss with a staff — and gives you an office worth coming back to.

Meet Nex Staff

Nex Staff is a web platform for solo founders who need a company-sized skill set on a one-person budget.

You run a pixel office — not a spreadsheet with a chat box. An Assistant coordinates at Reception. You walk the floor, see who’s working, hire specialists, and delegate quests. Staff work async in the background; when they finish, you get a quest complete moment — a notification, a walk-in, a deliverable to open.

How it works

The flow is deliberately simple:

You (Boss)
    │
    ▼
Assistant ──► chat, documents, research, coordination
    │
    ├── hire ──► Specialist staff join your roster
    │
    └── delegate ──► Staff work async (you don't wait)
                        │
                        ▼
                   Deliverable + notification

AI agents, not one chat thread. Each staff member has a role, tools, and access to your company knowledge. The Assistant routes work, tracks progress, and reports back — so you’re managing a team, not babysitting a model.

Stay motivated, not just productive

The RPG-style UX is intentional. Workspace, desks, NPC dialogue, and quest-complete moments aren’t decoration — they’re how we fight founder fatigue.

• People to talk to — NPC dialogue with the Assistant and staff, not a cold prompt window
• Wins you can feel — task board progress, ! emotes when work is done, quest-complete banners
• Forward motion without waiting — delegate and keep exploring; staff ship while you plan the next move

The goal isn’t only faster output. It’s making the founder journey less lonely and less boring — so you keep building long after the initial excitement fades.

The tech stack

Nex Staff is built for real delegation, not demo theater:

Layer	Technology
Agents	AI SDK 7 — ToolLoopAgent (Assistant), DurableAgent + Vercel Workflow (staff tasks)
Coder staff	@cursor/sdk Cloud Agent on your GitHub repo
Client websites	Cloudflare Workers — branch preview URLs for coder deliverables
Documents	Vercel Blob storage + Neon Postgres / pgvector for search
Harness	Eval framework — routing scenarios, deliverable rubrics, checkpoint gates
Models	Google Gemini (default) or OpenRouter
App	Next.js 16, React 19, Tailwind CSS v4, Better Auth

Worker output is measured, not assumed. Routing benchmarks, deliverable rubrics, and checkpoint verification keep staff reliable as you add roles and scale delegation.

Building together at RAISE

Hackathons compress product work into a sharp feedback loop — but the best part is rarely the code alone. It’s the room: laptops open, ideas bouncing, someone finally getting the async delegate flow to click, and the whole table breaking into a grin when a quest completes.

We’re really enjoying our time at RAISE Hackathon 2026. Nex Staff is built for solo founders who need a team around them; building it as an actual team has been the best proof of the idea.

What we’re learning

For Nex Staff, the hardest design choice has not been the agents — it has been the feeling.

Solo founders don’t quit because the idea failed. They quit because the journey felt lonely, repetitive, and draining. Every pixel in the office, every quest-complete banner, every async handoff exists to answer one question: will you open the app tomorrow?

The conversations at RAISE around agent orchestration, founder tooling, and what “having a team” actually means are giving us sharper direction than any feature list alone could.

The Team

Nex Staff is being built by Team Tihado at RAISE Hackathon 2026: Viet Tien Ngoc, Hanh Thi-Hong Tran, Tan Nhat Linh LE, Phuong Nhi Chau, and Anh Nguyen.

---

Build a team. Ship your project. Stay in the game.

Tihado — Building in public.