our tools suck.

not the dev part, that part's honestly fine.¹ we're talking about the everything else part.

you know what we mean. your editor's fine, your compiler works great, your framework doesn't hate you (java spring users dni)², git does git things, and curl exists everywhere (nix users also dni)^{2, 3}.

it's all the non-dev stuff that really really sucks.

from the moment you start your day,

you get hit with a deluge of things, all from different apps.

twelve unread channels on slack along with eight @mentions, two from your PM for jira updates, one from the ci bot, one from the half-broken zapier integration an intern wrote, and four from zendesk pinging your team.

and then you go deal with the out-links. you open jira (or linear if you're lucky), github, notion (or god forbid confluence), zendesk, asana, gsuite, and before you know it, you've hit 45 new tabs across 6 different services. your m2 macbook pro is whining for mercy.

and all of this happens before you even open vscode.

even when you're actually working.

you'll be debugging. the bug report is stuffed into linear, the docs are in notion, the discussion of the bug is somehow spread across three separate slack threads. congrats, those 45 tabs are now 12 tabs! it's still twelve whole pages you need to switch through though.

suddenly, you get those three knocks from slack. your tech lead is asking for an update and oops, there goes all the context you've built up in your head as you're answering their question and reopening more tabs.

by the time you're done, you've wasted an hour and your brain needs to pick up where you left off except you have to re-read everything to get back to where you were. you weren't shipping code, you were playing detective in your own knowledge base.

and that's not even the worst part.

say you've had enough of it. no more! no more slack, no more jira, no more notion! you'll go to skype (teams), use word docs and send emails like it's 2002.

and it's then you realise that each platform really doesn't want you to leave. sure. slack lets you export your messages. but guess what, it's plain old json. good luck trying to figure out how to parse through a couple million messages worth of unstructured data.

and slack's the nice one. ever try exporting jira? exporting zendesk? exporting notion? it's impossible to get anywhere, and let's not even get started with your integrations. that ci pipeline's not gonna rebuild itself.

they don't want you to leave. that's the business model.

we deserve better. you deserve better.

no more context loss, no more broken integrations, no more lock in. all of your context and knowledge in one place, meshed within each other, and all entirely yours.

normally this is where we'd promise you that we'll never hold your data hostage, or we'll never jack your prices, or whatever else gets said.

we're not going to do that. because no matter how much we might want to try to do so in the future, we literally can't. you can thank the atproto for that.

it's time for something better.