An AI office where you're the boss and Michael does the managing

What it does

Don’t Be Michael is a local multi-agent harness for small businesses. You pick your kind of business (restaurant, retail, SaaS, etc.), it suggests a team of Claude Code agents — finance, support, sales, marketing — and a manager agent named Michael routes work between them. You talk only to Michael; he delegates, runs an hourly standup, and escalates only decisions that genuinely need you. Everything runs on your own machine, on the Claude plan you already pay for.

The interesting bit

The mailbox model is the clever part: each agent works from the inbox matching its job (support@, sales@, ceo@), with per-agent send permissions — send freely, send on approval, or draft only. Repeated approvals can be promoted to “sends without asking” for a specific kind of email, with a separate check that still catches outliers. Agents can’t forward or attach mail across mailboxes, and nothing deletes mail. It’s real least-privilege design applied to email, of all things.

Key highlights

• Michael is the single dispatcher — agents request work from each other through him, not directly
• Per-agent memory of your preferences and corrections, with background tidy-up so it improves instead of accumulating
• Circuit breaker: looping agents get steered, then held, then stopped; stuck prompts are auto-restarted
• Pulse view shows what the office got done and each member’s share of your plan’s cost
• House rules enforced: agents must cite sources, admit unknowns, and never invent people or quotes

Caveats

• Early release, macOS and Windows 11 only; Outlook and Microsoft 365 mailboxes aren’t supported yet
• The Office-sitcom naming (Pam, Kelly, Dwight) is a lot if you’re not into it
• It’s fundamentally orchestration glue over Claude Code — the value is the routing, permissions, and guardrails, not novel model work

Verdict

Worth a look if you run a small business and want agents that stay in their lanes on real inboxes. If you wanted a general-purpose agent framework, this is opinionated software for a very specific buyer.