Keeping community human while scaling with agents
By Steven Van ·
A Claude-powered "Community Guardian" now triages and routes Vercel's developer forum, reassigning stale threads and flagging duplicates automatically.
Vercel built an internal agent system called Community Guardian to take over the triage and routing work in its developer community, so its team can spend more time on direct, human responses.
- When a new post comes in, the Guardian analyzes it, checks for duplicates, and assigns it to the team member with the right specialty and bandwidth, capping each person at 10 open questions before new ones go to someone else.
- Unanswered questions get reassigned after 48 hours, and the Guardian sends reminders when the team is waiting on more information and detects when a conversation has been resolved.
- A second agent, c0, lives in Slack and researches context for a thread by searching Vercel's knowledge base, docs, GitHub issues and past discussions, and can be asked for a summary of "top product feedback" across recent posts.
The Guardian runs on Claude through AI Gateway and Vercel Workflows, checking for new threads every 10 minutes and sleeping between cycles. In its first 23 days, the system helped 281 unique users: it gathered initial context on 4,716 threads, revived 1 in 8 "ghosted" threads for 23 confirmed solutions, logged over 1,400 agent runs in a recent two-week period, and flagged four duplicate threads via vector similarity, auto-closing three at 95%+ confidence.
Vercel says the system was built by a non-engineer on its community team using a coding agent, on top of the Chat SDK, its TypeScript SDK for building agents across Slack, Teams and Discord.
