Made Basecamp and HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of 37signals. Created Ruby on Rails. Wrote REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE.
In the past 18 months, we've experimented with a ton of AI-infused features at 37signals. Fizzy had all sorts of attempts. As did Basecamp. But as Microsoft and many others have realized, it's not that easy to make something that's actually good and would welcomed by users. So we didn't ship.
In the meantime, agents have emerged has the killer app for AI. Not only are LLMs much smarter when they can check their thinking using tools, but the file system also gives them the memory implant they needed to learn between prompts. And now they can actually do stuff!
Not only can you have your agent look through everything in Basecamp, summarize whatever you need, but it can also set up to-do lists, post message updates, chat with humans and clankers alike, upload reference files, and arrange a project schedule. Anything you can do in Basecamp, agents can now do too.
This becomes extra powerful when you combine Basecamp with all the other tools you might be using that are also agent accessible. For software development, you can use the MCP from Sentry to trawl through major sources of bugs, then have the agent summarize that in a message for Basecamp. Or you have it download, analyze, and highlight key customer complaints by giving it access to your help desk system.
All this was possible in the past with APIs, hand-written integrations, and human data scientists. But it was cumbersome, slow, and expensive, so most people just didn't. A vanishingly small portion of Basecamp customers have ever directly interacted with our API. But agents? I think adoption is going to be swift.
Not because everyone is going to run OpenCode, Claude Code, or Gemini CLI. But because agents are going to be incorporated into ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and all the other mainstream interfaces who were collectively embarrassed by OpenClaw's meteoric ascent and popularity very quickly. There's a huge demand out there for a personal agent that can act as your private executive assistant.
This is where the puck is going, and we're skating to meet it with agent accessibility across the board. Basecamp is first, Fizzy is next, and we'll hit HEY before long too. Revamped APIs, comprehensive CLIs, and the skills to use them whatever your harness or claws look like.
The Danish election is tomorrow. One of the central themes in the incumbent campaign has been a proposed wealth tax. The fig leaf for this proposal was "smaller classrooms in the early grades", but that quickly fell off, and the debate centered on "inequality". And it's true that inequality is a problem in Denmark: There's not nearly enough!
I know that sounds sacrilegious. Even most of the business-friendly press and parties in Denmark dance around this topic. Which makes political sense because the word "inequality" leads most people to think of poverty and destitution. But that's not the reality in the little kingdom that could.
Denmark has an enormous state apparatus (half of GDP and a third of all workers!) that offers equal access to everything from health care to education and a million programs in between. It could surely be slimmed and trimmed, but on the whole, it works remarkably well. The average Dane is incredibly well cared for by any international standard (high-trust society, hurray!).
By those same standards, it's the 8th most equal country in the world on income, as measured by the Gini coefficient (0.28). But this is where the numbers start spellbinding the debate. Because the Danish Gini coefficient perversely "degrades" if new businesses succeed, as any time successful founders and high-paid employees earning incomes above the median "worsen" inequality.
This is obviously nonsense. When the pie gets bigger, it gets better for all, as long as nobody is robbed of their existing slice. Denmark should clearly want new successful businesses! It should love to see founders reap big rewards when the risks pay off. It should celebrate early employees making fortunes on stock grants. But all too often, it just doesn't.
Just to put it on a pin: Danes hate flashy cars with a passion that stretches back much further than the current green excuses. But buying a $300,000 Ferrari in Denmark is one of the most patriotic things you can possibly do! You'll end up paying almost three times the price for the privilege, and sending 2/3s of that to the treasury in taxes. Truly a contribution to the common cause worthy of admiration, not scorn!
But because the debate around inequality is anchored in a fixed-pie paradigm, scorn is all you're likely to get. Anyone who does well in Denmark is immediately suspected of having succeeded at the expense of others. Probably through some form of nefarious exploitation, even if we can't prove what?! There is a core national politics of grievance and envy.
But, however human that may be, the future progress and prosperity of the country depends on rejecting this zero-sum delusional dogma. The Danish economy is currently doing well compared to the rest of the EU, but it's dangerously dependent on a handful of vintage corporations pulling the bulk of the load.
This simply has to change if the Danes wish to retain their high standards of living going forward. No corporation lasts forever. Novo Nordisk was Europe's most valuable company at the start of last year, now it's worth half that, and is out of the top ten. And who knows what the closing of the Hormuz Strait will do to Maersk. These two companies alone represent roughly a quarter of all Denmark's exports!
Meanwhile, new business formation just hit an all-time low. And only a tiny portion of the big employers in Denmark were created in the last thirty years. And thus, almost all the wealth that funds the highly-prized welfare state is coming from really old companies. Many of them over a hundred years old.
This is wonderful in many ways. The Danes should be rightfully proud to host Maersk (1904), Novo (1923), Vestas (1945), Lego (1932), and other international heavy-weights. But it can't rely on this aging corporate vintage to forever bear fruit for tomorrow.
Tomorrow needs to be tended to by planting new seeds. New companies. New growth. New capital. And that's just not going to happen if the Danish state declares itself at war with capital formation or accumulation. It should be so lucky to have more rich people, with more capital, and the talent to deploy it toward a better, shared future (or spend it on heavily-taxed Ferraris!).
The ballot boxes open tomorrow morning. It's predicted to be a close one. Fingers crossed for a prosperous choice.
The original concept for ONCE sought to sell self-hostable web apps for a one-time fee. That didn't work. Sure, we recouped the investment on Campfire, our chat app, but that was it. You gotta listen when the market tells you what it wants! And it didn't seem to want to pay for self-hosted web apps in a one-off way.
So we set Campfire, Writebook, and now Fizzy free by releasing them all as open source with a permissive license. That worked! Tons of people have been running these apps on their own servers, contributing code back, and learning how we build real production applications at 37signals.
Now we're doubling down on the gift and adding an integrated way to run all these apps, and your own vibe-coded adventures too, on a brand-new application server we're also calling ONCE.
If you twist my arm, I can make that spell "Open Network Container Executor", but we don't even have to go there. Once is just a cool word, we already own the domain, and it's running all the original applications released under that banner as free and open-source installations. That's good enough!
The pitch here is that installing a whole suite of applications on your own server should be dead easy. The original ONCE model wanted a dedicated box or VM per app, which was just cumbersome and costly to maintain. Now you can use a single machine — even your laptop! — to run everything all at once.
ONCE gives you a beautiful terminal interface to track application metrics, like RAM + CPU usage, as well as basic visitor + request/second counts. It also gives you zero-downtime upgrades and scheduled backups. It's meant to be able to run all the infrastructure apps you'd need, like our full suite and all the ones your AI agents will soon be building for you.
Give it a spin. It's just a single command to install. I can show you how with this YouTube video tour. Enjoy!
The vibes around Linux are changing fast. Companies of all shapes and sizes are paying fresh attention. The hardware game on x86 is rapidly improving. And thanks to OpenCode and Claude Code, terminal user interfaces (TUIs) are suddenly everywhere. It's all this and Omarchy that we'll be celebrating in New York City on April 10 at the Shopify SoHo Space for the first OMACON!
We've got an incredible lineup of speakers coming. The creator of Hyprland, Vaxry, will be there. Along with ThePrimeagen and TJ DeVries. You'll see OpenCode creator Dax Raad. Omarchy power contributors Ryan Hughes and Bjarne Øverli. As well as Chris Powers (Typecraft) and myself as Linux superfans. All packed into a single day of short sessions, plenty of mingle time, and some good food.
Tickets go on sale tomorrow (February 19) at 10am EST. We only have room for 130 attendees total, so I imagine the offered-at-cost $299 tickets will go quickly. But if you can't manage to snatch a ticket in time, we'll also be recording everything, so you won't be left out entirely.
But there is just something special about being together in person about a shared passion. I've felt the intensity of that three years in a row now with Rails World. There's an endless amount of information and instruction available online, but a sense of community and connection is far more scarce. We nerds need this.
We also need people to JUST DO THINGS. Like kick off a fresh Linux distribution together with over three hundred contributors so far all leaning boldly into aesthetics, ergonomics, and that omakase spirit.
Omarchy only came about last summer, now we're seeing 50,000 ISO downloads a week, 30,000 people on the Discord, and now our very first exclusive gathering in New York City. This is open source at its best. People from all over, coming together, making cool shit.
(Oh, and thanks to Shopify and Tobi for hosting. You gotta love when a hundred-plus billion dollar company like this is run by an uber nerd who can just sign off on doing something fun and cool for the community without any direct plausible payback.)
With OpenClaw you're giving AI its own machine, long-term memory, reminders, and persistent execution. The model is no longer confined to a prompt-response cycle, but able to check its own email, Basecamp notifications, and whatever else you give it access to on a running basis. It's a sneak peek at a future where everyone has a personal agent assistant, and it's fascinating.
I set up mine on a Proxmox virtual machine to be fully isolated from my personal data and logins. (But there are people out there running wild and giving OpenClaw access to everything on their own machine, despite the repeated warnings that this is more than a little risky!).
Then I tried to see just how little help it would need navigating our human-centric digital world. I didn't install any skills, any MCPs, or give it access to any APIs. Zero machine accommodations. I just started off with a simple prompt: "Sign up for Fizzy, so we have a place to collaborate. Here's the invite link."
Kef, as I named my new agent, dutifully went to Fizzy to sign up, but was immediately stumped by needing an email address. It asked me what to do, and I replied: "Just go to hey.com and sign up for a new account." So it did. In a single try. No errors, no steering, no accommodations.
After it had procured its own email address, it continued on with the task of signing up for Fizzy. And again, it completed the mission without any complications. Now we had a shared space to collaborate.
So, as a test, I asked it to create a new board for business ideas, and add five cards with short suggestions, including providing a background image sourced from the web to describe the idea. And it did. Again, zero corrections. Perfect execution.
I then invited it to Basecamp by just adding it as I would any other user. That sent off an email to Kef's new HEY account, which it quickly received, then followed the instructions, got signed up, and greeted everyone in the chat room of the AI Labs project it was invited to.
I'm thoroughly impressed. All the agent accommodations, like MCPs/CLIs/APIs, probably still have a place for a bit longer, as doing all this work cold is both a bit slow and token-intensive. But I bet this is just a temporary crutch.
And while I ran this initial experiment on Claude's Opus 4.5, I later reran most of it on the Chinese open-weight model Kimi K2.5, and it too was able to get it all right (though it was a fair bit slower when provisioned through OpenRouter).
Everything is changing so fast in the world of AI right now, but if I was going to skate to where the puck is going to be, it'd be a world where agents, like self-driving cars, don't need special equipment, like LIDAR or MCPs, to interact with the environment. The human affordances will be more than adequate.
I fully understand the nostalgia for real ownership of physical-media games. I grew up on cassette tapes (C64 + Amstrad 464!), floppy disks (C64 5-1/4" then Amiga 3-1/2"), cartridges, and CDs. I occasionally envy the retro gamers on YouTube with an entire wall full of such physical media. But do you know what I like more than collecting? Playing! Anywhere. Anything. Anytime.
We went through the same coping phases with movies and music. Yes, vinyl had a resurgence, but it's still a tiny sliver of hours listened. Same too with 4K Blue-rays. Almost everyone just listens to Spotify or watches on Netflix these days. It's simply cheaper, faster, and, thus, better.
Not "better" in some abstract philosophical way (ownership vs rent) or even in a concrete technical way (bit rates), but in a practical way. Paying $20/month for unlimited music and the same again for a broad selection of shows and movies is clearly a deal most consumers are happy to make.
So why not video games? Well, because it just wasn't good enough! Netflix tried for casual gaming, but I didn't hear much of that after the announcement. Google Stadia appears to have been just a few years ahead of reality (eerie how often that happens for big G, like with both AI and AR!) as they shut down their service already.
NVIDIA, though, kept working, and its GeForce NOW service is actually, finally kinda amazing! I had tried it back in the late 2010s, and just didn't see anything worth using back then. Maybe my internet was too slow, maybe the service just wasn't good enough yet. But then I tried it again a few days ago, just after NVIDIA shipped the native GFN client for Linux, and holy smokes!!
You can legitimately play Fortnite in 2880x1800 at 120 fps through a remote 4080, and it looks incredible. Yes, there's a little input lag, but it's shockingly, surprisingly playable on a good internet connection. And that's with the hardest possible genre: competitive shooters! If you play racing games like Forza Horizon or story-mode games like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, you can barely tell!
This is obviously a great option for anyone with a modest computer that can't run the latest triple-A titles, but also for Linux gamers who don't have access to run the cheat-protection software required for Fortnite and a few other games.
And, like Spotify and Netflix, it's pretty competitively priced. It's $20/month for access to that 4080-tier. You'd quickly spend $2,000+ on a gaming rig with a 4080, so this isn't a half bad deal: it's a payback of 100 months, and by then you'd probably want a 6080 anyway. Funny how NVIDIA is better at offering the promise of cheap cloud costs than the likes of AWS!
Anyway, I've been very impressed with NVIDIA GeForce NOW. We're going to bake the Linux installer straight into the next version of Omarchy, so you can just go to Install > Gaming > NVIDIA GeForce NOW to get going (just like we have such options for Steam and Minecraft).
But of course seeing Fortnite running in full graphics on that remote 4080 made me hungry for even more. I've been playing Fortnite every week for the last five years or so with the kids, but the majority of my gameplay has actually been on tablet. A high-end tablet, like an iPad M5, can play the game with good-for-mobile graphics at 120 Hz. It's smooth, it's easy, and the kids and I can lounge on the couch and play together. Good Family Fun! Not peak visual fidelity, though.
So after the NVIDIA GeForce NOW experience, I found a way to use the same amazing game streaming technology at home through a local-server solution called Apollo and a client called Moonlight. This allowed me to turn my racing-sim PC that's stuck downstairs into a cloud-like remote gaming service that I can access anywhere on the local network, so I can borrow its 4090 to play 120-fps, ultra-settings Fortnite with zero perceivable input lag on any computer in the house.
The NVIDIA cloud streaming is very impressive, but the local-server version of the same is mind-blowing. I'm mostly using the Asus G14 laptop as a client, so Fortnite looks incredible with those ultra, high-resolution settings on its OLED, but unlike when you use that laptop's built-in graphics card, the machine stays perfectly cool and silent pulling a meager 18 watts. And the graphics are of course a lot nicer.
The Moonlight client is available for virtually every platform: Mac, iOS, Android, and of course Linux. That means no need to dual boot to enjoy the best games at the highest fidelity. No need for a honking big PC on my primary desk. I did not know this was an option!!
Whether you give NVIDIA's cloud gaming setup a try or repurpose a local gaming PC for the same, you're in for a real treat of what's possible with streaming Fortnite on ultra settings at 120 fps on Linux (or even Mac!). GG, NVIDIA!
