Reading up on Basecamp

Who knew that 22 years ago when we launched Basecamp we'd have built the absolute best framework to work with humans and agents in the same place. Here's @bitsweat talking to Clawdito (an agent) in Basecamp, assigning it work, getting responses, asking it to follow up, creating PRs, the whole thing. And here's @jasonzimdars working with Marie (an agent) and JZ bot (another agent, his agent) in a comment thread on a message board. Can do this anywhere in Basecamp... on a to-do, card, file, document, photo, anywhere you can talk to humans async or real time, you can talk with your agents the same way. And they can respond the same way humans do, right in line, right where you'd expect, with all the context in the thread. We've been running and refining this in our account for a while now. Anyone can do this today using the CLI. But we're also making it easier for people to create agent-users within Basecamp. Stay tuned for a lot more on this front.

@jasonfried

We just launched a feature we began exploring a decade+ ago, but never released it. It was originally destined for Campfire, our chat tool. The feature is called Bonfire. Now that Campfire is built into Basecamp, Bonfire belongs there. And today it's live for all Basecamp 5 customers. What's Bonfire? I put together a short video to show you what it is and how it works:

@jasonfried

Just cranking out the new fun stuff! Now you can add backgrounds to your Basecamp 5 projects. Here's a project where we keep all relevant customer feedback. Added a background and now when you hit the project and you instantly know exactly where you are. Lots of customization potential here. To add, click the project name to enter the settings view. You'll find the new Wallpaper option right there. Full screen or old school tiled backgrounds, you pick.

@jasonfried

Just shipped a new convenience feature in Basecamp 5. Now you can drag images/files directly onto a docs & files tool on your project page to upload them directly to the project. Before you had to click through then upload. Now you can just drop them right where you want them on the project page. Small details add up.

@jasonfried

Just shipped to all Basecamp 5 customers. Inside any Docs & Files tool, click the grid icon to flip to gallery mode.

@jasonfried

Here's a great use case for Claude and the Basecamp CLI. Pull together some inspirational photos of iconic furniture from around the world, and upload them to the appropriately named galleries inside a Basecamp project. Here's a quick walkthrough:

@jasonfried

Goodbye per-seat pricing. Per-user pricing has always rubbed me the wrong way. And in this agentic age, it feels downright antique. For the vast majority of the time Basecamp has been on offer, we never charged per-user. A few years ago we experimented with one pay-per-user plan, and that experiment just came to an end. And it couldn’t come at a better time. With the Basecamp CLI (and soon MCP, too), you can bring your agents to Basecamp as users too. Charging you for individual agents feels just as wrong as charging you for individual people. So today we have brand new pricing plans with NO PER-USER FEES. Studio (starting at just $59/month) and up includes UNLIMITED USERS + AGENTS. Lower plans don’t charge per-user either, but have a reasonable cap on the number of people you can invite. The primary cap is now on projects, which is also how our pricing was set for nearly 20 years. These new plans don’t affect current customers, so if you like what you’re on you can stick with it for now. We may offer a transition option down the road, but these new plans apply to brand new customers moving forward. The doors are open. Invite your team, your contractors, your collaborators, your clients, and your agents. Everyone’s included. Just you, a few, a dozen or two, or even hundreds more, invite them to your Basecamp and get everyone involved! Let's go!

@jasonfried

Version 1.4 of the HEY CLI is out. Lots of good stuff. More coverage (including Set Aside Groups). Getting better all the time... https://github.com/basecamp/hey-cli And more at https://hey.com/agents

@jasonfried

Another Basecamp update today! Now activity is condensed at the top of a project, and fully expanded at the bottom. Such a great way to just know what's been happening, daily, all the way back to day one. Simply scroll. Not on Basecamp yet? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Dumping Mac OS for Omarchy? Keep up the momentum... Dump that pile of "the usual" work tools and replace them with Basecamp. Revolution's in the air my friends.

@jasonfried

We just spent a morning in Chicago with a bunch of our customers. Woodworkers, music biz folks, publishers, educators, logistics pros, product designers, painters, medical device makers... Some who've been using Basecamp for more than a decade (and even one who's first day on Basecamp was THAT DAY!). Such a broad collection of folks! Here's a fun, one minute video recap. 😍

@jasonfried

Driving agents from Basecamp turned out to be a night-and-day improvement for me. It brought a much-welcomed sense of calm when moving multiple things forward at once. We’re actively working on this problem, and first-class support is coming soon. But since many people have asked for it, here is the experimental connector we have been using internally.

@jorgemanru

Omarchy is blowing up. I've never been involved with anything in my career that has grown this fast. With Ruby on Rails, we had years to build solid institutions, teams, and relationships. With Omarchy, we've been forced to figure it all out in twelve days. It's exhausting, but also incredibly exciting. It was never sustainable with just Ryan and me running everything. That's how it was, more or less, up until Quattro. Lots of other contributors, but all the responsibility was on us to make sure the ship stayed afloat, the servers didn't crash, and fixes got pushed out quickly. Now it's time to build a proper institution. Durable, resilient, and competent. That's what we're doing here on Basecamp now. I'm spinning up teams for every facet of responsible distro management, and I'm getting an absolute outpouring of interest for all of them. Everyone wants to be part of this. We're winning hearts, minds, and volunteers at an astounding rate. Great! We need all of it to succeed. Because make no mistake: There are many people who'd love to see this rocket blow up before it reaches the moon. Aggrieved Linux users who don't like the sudden attention their exclusive hobby has received. Competing Linux distributions that are seeing our numbers explode. Mac stans who've sunk their identity into an apple. And, of course, any of the haters I've picked up in my quarter-century career speaking bluntly on the internet. They're not going to succeed. Because we've already become unstoppable. There's too much momentum, too much money, and too much support now backing this effort. We're living the Mandate From Heaven meme at the moment. And we are here to fulfill the prophecy: The Year of Linux on the Desktop! That has been a joke for two decades. But by the end of the year, nobody at Apple or Microsoft is going to be laughing. They're going to be scrambling. Because neither of these proud organizations currently has any method to counter the speed, vision, or ambition with which we're going to accelerate into the future of personal computing. This is the moment. This is the opening. This is our chance. For thirty years, we've been subject to one OS overlord or another. Dictating how we compute. Choking off competitors through platform malfeasance. Tollboothing the distribution. That ends now. Because Linux is going to win. And Linux is free. As in beer, speech, and source. But just because it's inevitable doesn't mean it's going to be easy. We have a lot of work in front of us if we actually want to make our mark. But there's never been a better time for this kind of delusional ambition. The age of agents is the unlocking factor. It sounds like a LinkedIn slogan, but it's true. Where the application of tokens goes, the innovation follows. We can fix everything. Let's do it together. Let's go. --- This is what I sent to the dozens of new volunteers who've signed up for teams within the new Omarchy organization yesterday. But we might as well broadcast our mission and intentions to the world too.

@dhh

This morning we launched an updated My Bar in Basecamp 5. Now everything's instantly within reach no matter where you are, full-size, full screen. We also added "My Activity" so you can quickly see what you've been up to, easily get back to something you did recently, jump back to a thread you've been involved with, or review your work whenever someone asks "What have you been working on lately?". Super nice, super fast, super efficient. Have at it!

@jasonfried

Whenever someone gets promoted at 37signals, we post a company-wide message in Basecamp so everyone knows. Here's a real example of a message that covers two promotions (Silvia and Lewis):

@jasonfried

Agent Marie has been busy in our Basecamp today. Adding cards, commenting on replies, writing up reports, digging into stubborn issues, fixing bugs, preparing PRs. Everything posted right to Basecamp, just as if Marie was a human, so other humans (and agents) can follow along and get involved. No special AI features in Basecamp, no AI-is-always-in-the-way overload. Just invite your own agents in, point them at the Basecamp CLI, and they'll get to work just like your own human crew.

@jasonfried

Here's a 6-minute video walkthrough I made for our support team showing them a tweak to the new sidebar in Basecamp 5. It's a fundamental change to a sensitive feature, so I wanted to make sure they had both a heads up, and a principled walkthrough of the reasons behind the change. We're not done with it, but we're far enough along that all the big stuff is represented. I thought people who make product might find this behind-the-scenes stuff interesting, while others will probably be bored out of their minds. You choose!

@jasonfried

Today I did a livestream for about 300 Basecamp customers who were curious to see how we used Basecamp. One of the reasons I love running these are for the edge case requests and questions I get. They push me into obscure corners of the product to see if something's possible. Another reason is because I get directly gauge group enthusiasm around surprisingly small things that make a big difference. It's very hard to pick up on this otherwise when you're working with customers one-on-one. One of those things is the desktop app. Whenever I show that I'm using the dedicated desktop app rather than Chrome or Safari or whatever, people are blown away. In my mind they shouldn't be — Bascamp's had an app for a long time, it's not a big deal. But not enough people know about it. And what's the bit they like the most about the desktop app? It does everything the browser does, but it does one thing less: It doesn't mix Basecamp up with all your other browser tabs. That's what gets the big time ooohs and ahhhs. A simple thing, but a big deal. No more hunting among 65 other tabs for the 3 Basecamp tabs you want to keep open. The desktop app has its own tabs, but they're only Basecamp tabs. No mixing. I never would have known that was such a big deal to that many people had I not be in a group setting showing off the product. Live group demos are really priceless.

@jasonfried

Problem: Your CI server is slow, but your dev machines are fast. Solution: Use your dev machine to run checks quickly instead of waiting on slow CI. https://github.com/basecamp/gh-signoff

@housecor

Fun little (big) project we launched this morning. A live look at how many people are using Basecamp all over the world. http://basecamp.com/live

@jasonfried

Now live in your Basecamp 5 account. Zoom the center column on home to go all-in on the project grid.

@jasonfried

Basecamp 5 is live! And the new website is a throwback to a simpler time. Just show the damn product. Just list the features. Yes, it's agent accessible, but it's not agent hysteric. https://basecamp.com/

@dhh

Lexxy is one of the big upgrades in Basecamp 5. Finally we have tables! We have markdown! We have live syntax highlighting! Trix served us well for many years, but Lexxy's arrival is a massive upgrade. Big props to @meta for making the underlying Lexical toolkit 🤘

@dhh

Here's another look a the same feature, bookmarking, in this case, executed differently in Basecamp 4 vs. Basecamp 5. Even the little things are significantly better.

@jasonfried

First I critique something particularly embarrassing in Basecamp 4, and then show you how we completely redesigned the same flow in Basecamp 5. We grow!

@jasonfried

Omarchy 3.7 is out! Huge release with new CLI, tons more gaming options, unlock screen themeing, OCR text extraction, cliamp, Asus ExpertBook PTL compatibility, and a million other fixes and improvements. https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v3.7.0

@dhh

Basecamp is now fully agent accessible with a brand-new and comprehensive CLI, wrapped by a great skill, and backed by a revamped and much expanded API. It's a fantastic way to give your agents access to everything in Basecamp and integrate it anywhere. https://basecamp.com/agents

@dhh

ONCE is back! It's now a full-fledged application server for running dockerized web apps, like Campfire/Writebook/Fizzy or your own vibe-coded adventures. Zero-downtime upgrades, scheduled backups, and a gorgeous TUI with hyperdrive graphics. Enjoy! https://github.com/basecamp/once

@dhh

Omarchy 3.4 is out! Massive release with 61 contributors, three new themes, tailored Tmux, new screenshot flow, new agent features (claude by default + tmux swarm!), keyboard RGB theme syncing, and a million other things. https://t.co/TNTp4kl137 pic.twitter.com/svamyqHV1p

@dhh

INTRODUCING FIZZYHave you noticed that every issue and idea tracking tool you loved slowly morphed into boring, sluggish, corporate bloatware?Trello put on 40 pounds of cruft. Jira started charging by the migraine. Asana tried to become everything to everyone. GitHub Issues… pic.twitter.com/7cGxaWA8kd

@jasonfried