Backstage: agentic modernization

Backstage helped venues market their shows, but the product had grown into a wall of forms. Adding a single show meant a 20-plus-field form across seven sections; starting a post meant five levels of cascading dropdowns. There was no monitoring, so ticket-sales surprises only showed up at show time, and a calendar-first layout buried the shows that needed attention. The friction was driving clients away.

Underneath, though, was a real asset: a mature Rails application with a working social-publishing pipeline, billing, auth, and an early AI prototype. The job wasn’t to rip it out, but to make it feel modern and intelligent.

The architecture protects the investment in Rails while opening the door to an agentic experience. You add a clean, versioned API to the existing app, build the new front end in Next.js, and promote the AI prototype to a real feature. The business logic, social publishing, billing, and auth all stay exactly where they are. They just get a better interface and a smarter layer on top.

Instead of “AI generates strategy,” the whole product is reframed around a team of specialized agents on a shared runtime. They show up consistently on every screen, from onboarding (“meet your team”) to the command center. Three pipelines carry the work, each built on the same principle.

We delivered the modernization architecture, the agentic-pipeline design, a full set of wireframes covering every screen and flow, and a locked design system. That was the whole blueprint for the build. The client was confident enough in the plan to take it in-house and build it themselves with Claude.