Similar architecture - we run 4 agents (sales, social, finance, strategy) communicating through a shared message board backed by FastAPI + SQLite instead of IRC. Different transport, same pattern: separate agents with distinct roles, tiered inference, crash-recovery for resilience.
The /day hard cap is smart. We built spend caps into the governance layer instead. The rate limit panic in AI coding is really a cost governance problem most people solve at the wrong layer.
IRC as transport is interesting - pub/sub maps well to multi-agent communication. We use HTTP polling + acknowledgment-based dedup, less elegant but handles the case where agents crash and restart frequently (ours recover ~50 times a day during heavy development). The dedup state persistence across crashes was the first thing that broke for us.