We built a presence dock for our team. Here's why.
Something has changed about software teams in the last eighteen months, and we don't think anyone has named it yet.
Every engineer on a small team can now ship production quality work, fast. The output per engineer has multiplied by magnitudes.
The part that gets less attention: coordination got harder by exactly the same multiple. If one person ships ten times more code, in ten times more places, branching off in ten times more directions — then the cost of knowing what your teammates are doing scales with it.
The same tools that let us ship this fast also force us, for the first time, to write down what we're trying to do. Every prompt is a small, live, machine-readable description of the work — composed by the person doing the work, at the moment they're doing it.
That has never been true before. The whole history of project management has been a workaround for not having it - standups, tickets, status threads.
Now it does - the signal for work is sitting right there in the prompts, generated as a byproduct of the work itself.
The opportunity is to read it.
So that's what we're building.
Slashtalk is a presence dock for small teams shipping at this new pace. It sits on top of your desktop. Each teammate is a card. Each card shows what they're shipping right now — recent PRs, active sessions, the work in flight — synthesized from their prompts and their PRs.
When someone wants to know what features the team is working on today, they ask the dock instead of pinging engineers. When two people are about to collide on the same file, it's flagged. The answers come from the work itself.
We built it for ourselves, because we're a small remote team that ran headfirst into the problem we just described. We're now shipping more with fewer interruptions and bonus - its fun to feel like your team is hanging out with you while you work.
If you're on a team where the shipping got faster but the coordination got worse — try Slashtalk and tell us what you think.