Builder Story: How Two Builders Shipped 200+ Features Using AI Agents and BrainGrid

"BrainGrid is the most agnostic piece of my stack. I'll drop models. I won't drop planning."

• Clay Unicorn

#Background: The AI Power Users

#Who are the builders?

Matt Bernier and Clay Unicorn are the minds behind Unicorn.love, a venture accelerator and studio based in Denver. As deeply technical founders and consultants, they constantly test the limits of new AI tools, not just for their own SaaS products, but for the many companies they advise.

Matt Bernier has worn both hats: product manager and software engineer. After years shipping in larger organizations, he found himself drawn back into building, partly because AI made coding fun again. Instead of spending his best energy on repetitive work, Matt uses agents to handle the parts he no longer wants to do manually, allowing him to focus on product decisions and execution.

Clay Unicorn has been building software for nearly 24 years, starting with an early obsession with Star Trek, androids, and AI. As a teenager, he experimented with neural networks long before AI became mainstream. Since then, he has worked across agencies, consulting, and product development, riding every major technology wave along the way. Today, he balances deep experience with the urgency of keeping up in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Internally, they are building two of their own SaaS companies and centralizing core intellectual property into a reusable framework. Externally, they advise a pipeline of large public companies, helping them scope features, manage development, and accelerate time to market. To do this effectively, they need a robust system to manage requirements and development across the entire portfolio.

#Vision: An AI-Powered Venture Studio

#What are they building?

Unicorn is not building a single product. They are building a venture studio engine.

Internally, they are developing multiple SaaS companies while consolidating core intellectual property into a reusable platform framework. Externally, they consult with startups and large companies to scope features, execute builds, and move faster.

Their challenge is not whether they can code.
Their challenge is whether they can translate messy real-world inputs into clean, executable work across many projects without becoming the bottleneck.

#Who is Unicorn for?

Their system is designed for a wide range of users, including internal developers, portfolio companies, and non-technical stakeholders.

A key goal is empowering product managers, QA teams, and operational leads to contribute directly to the development process without needing deep engineering expertise.

#What does it solve?

They are solving the core problem of ambiguity in software development. AI coding agents fail when given vague instructions, and human teams waste time clarifying scope.

Unicorn needed a way to bridge this gap by creating clear, context-aware specifications that both humans and AI agents can execute reliably.

As Clay puts it, for the startups they advise:

“This kind of replaces a CPO for you.”

#The Turning Point: Choosing BrainGrid

Matt discovered BrainGrid through a Denver vibe coding meetup. At the time, he was demoing an open source tool he had been hacking on to tie tasks to repos and spin up worktrees automatically. He was actively modifying it to better fit his workflow.

Then a friend pointed him to BrainGrid.

What happened next became a defining moment.

On a call with Tyler Wells, BrainGrid’s co-founder and CTO, Matt shut down the tool he had been hacking on, signed up for BrainGrid, and started using it immediately. BrainGrid was already solving the exact problems he had been trying to patch together.

The difference was simple. BrainGrid did not just generate tasks. It asked the right questions.

Matt knew it was real the moment BrainGrid began clarifying context and exposing gaps in his thinking.

Clay had his own conversion moment. After testing dozens of tools and learning to pass or fail them in minutes, BrainGrid stood out.

“It wasn’t too literal on the product side, and it didn’t ignore engineering reality. It bridged the gap.”

He did not even need to see the output. The questions alone proved the system understood what mattered.

#BrainGrid becomes the shared brain for the team

BrainGrid quickly became Unicorn’s central nervous system, not just for engineers, but for the entire team.

They began routing product feedback, QA notes, and bug reports into BrainGrid so those inputs could be turned into structured, agent-ready work without constant context switching.

One partner, Mark, who had previously managed large engineering organizations, started submitting detailed bug reports complete with screenshots and reproduction steps. BrainGrid guided him through the right questions, producing specifications engineers could act on immediately.

Clay described the shift clearly:

“Instead of bug reports living in Slack and requiring a human to digest each one, BrainGrid made them feature complete for execution.”

In many cases, Clay never even reviewed the items himself. Agents could pick them up directly.

#Outcomes: Shipping at a Pace That Feels Unfair

The results were dramatic and measurable.

Clay reports the team completed more than 200 backlog items, many of which were one to three day features. These were not small tasks.

Matt put it in concrete terms. Since early October, they built a full platform system and an OAuth application on top of it. He estimates the output would normally require a team of roughly 10 developers working for four to five years.

They also saw a major workflow multiplier from BrainGrid’s CLI and Claude skills integration.

Matt explained how slash commands allow him to go from “I need a task” to execution instantly. He can list requirements, select one, run /build, and the agent already understands how to operate within the system.

The result is less ceremony, fewer repeated prompts, and far more parallel progress.

#What changed in how they work

They did not just move faster. They became more scalable.

Clay described BrainGrid as instrumental from the very first step of thinking through a bug fix or feature. Unlike models that come and go, BrainGrid stays because it is about planning and structure.

Matt added another perspective. As teams grow beyond two people, coordination costs explode. BrainGrid reduces collisions by helping people pull the right tasks, assign work clearly, and avoid duplicated effort.

BrainGrid turns high-speed agentic development into something that works for teams, not just solo power users.

#The bottleneck is moving: QA and security

With planning and development accelerating, the bottleneck shifts hard into QA and security.

Matt referenced Theory of Constraints and described the reality clearly. When upstream throughput increases, whatever cannot keep up becomes the bottleneck. QA has always been one. Now it becomes more painful as output increases.

This is where BrainGrid becomes even more important, because the system that structures work must also help structure validation.

#What They Want Next from BrainGrid

They shared two concrete feature requests.

#1) Default testing and validation built into tasks

They want baseline expectations included automatically:

• Update unit tests
• Update integration tests
• Update UI tests
• Create tests if they do not exist
• Ensure all tests pass

The goal is simple: make quality continuous, not optional.

#2) Facets or metadata on tasks

Clay wants tasks labeled by type:

• Front end
• Back end
• Testing
• Database
• Security

This is not about choosing tools automatically. It is about enabling better orchestration. They already use different models for different job types, and metadata would make triage and delegation faster.

#Final Thoughts

Unicorn’s story shows what happens when experienced builders push agentic development to its limits. They are not experimenting for novelty. They are shipping real systems, for real stakeholders, at real speed.

BrainGrid became their backbone because it solved the hardest problem in modern software development:

Turning ambiguous intent into executable reality.

Check out Unicorn.love