OpenAI's Peter Steinberger and 37signals founder Jason Fried debate if AI agents can fix the structural flaws of workplace chat

@jasonfried Amen

@gregisenberg I wanna frame this and hang it on the wall at OpenAI.

@jasonfried I like @naval ‘s suggestion: use email as standard, then text (to phone) and call for natural escalation. People will think harder before escalating (hoping I didn’t paraphrase too much).

Slack just makes it too easy to give the task to someone else.

@jasonfried Anybody using Basecamp to manage agents (like Hermes/openclaw)? Seems like a neat idea 🤔

@tylertringas @dhh can talk about that, and http://basecamp.com/agents gives agents the tools to work with you in Basecamp. Been enlightening having them work with us in our account.

@parasharmrigesh Read the piece.

@jochenstu Good luck with that. The medium pushes against that at every point. It's a conveyor belt. Pay attention now or it's too late.

@jasonfried JASON, MY EYES

@jasonfried How is chat a bottleneck? Would love to understand this deeply.

We’re still using chat as an interface to talk to our coding agents, which works autonomously, and pings when it needs more context.

@jasonfried The debate over chat tools is the same as the one over open-plan offices.

@jasonfried This is a what I hated about Slack. Not just *one* "all-day meeting, with random participants, and no agenda"...but maybe 20! Chat became the "solution" to everything. Email (or other async, long-form communication) was ditched. This was a all step backwards.

@jasonfried Most of the problems go away when you make people turn off notifications, work in threads and have spaces where the default expectation is non-participation.

@mathieuhelie Those are bad too!

@tylertringas @jasonfried I was just thinking of trying to make my openclaw use Basecamp for its own “memory”. Agents seem to need project management tools to stay sane, just like humans. A bunch of scattered md files with a search tool doesn’t seem sufficient from my own experience.

Yes, exactly.

We've have agents making their own to-do lists so we can track their progress. It's nice to know what they're going to do, what's in progress, and what's been done.

And then they'll post a full writeup either as a comment on a particular to-do or card, or post a message. Either way, we're all in the loop. We can comment back in the thread, it's all on the record.

@steipete 🥹

@jasonfried It always amuses me just how unslack slack is, when you know the meaning of the word: "Slack primarily means loose, relaxed, or lacking in activity."

@jasonfried Working for us! Small medical business with 10 ppl, 6 years in. Took some dialing in. Nothing is "now" by design, work is expected to happen in spaces and threads, not in DMs. People eventually react to deliberate pings, read up on one "news" space and that's it.

@ChrisCuilla There you go. It's a terrible way to work. Chat is useful as an accessory, but it's a terrible first-line approach to work.