MACRO

@FedericoNoemie Us!

building a list of the best tools for solo founders, what should I add?

Before he was a frontend engineer, Russell fell in love with color. Color, and sound. He spent his days learning Blender and building synthesizers from scratch. He learned how to screen print, how to combine colorspaces. He moved to New York and met many fellow color and sound lovers.For a while, the making, the community, and the feeling that he was exactly where the work needed him to be was enough. But Russell had always been drawn to the places where disciplines bleed into each other. The screen was just another surface. Code was just another material. So much of design is about sensitivity and knowing when something feels slightly wrong before you can say why, keeping the patience to adjust until it's right. Russell knows this. He brings that same instinct to the frontend. Each interface a little closer to right. Russell designs and creates many strange things with many strange people. Now, he works at Macro.

Here's a real life example of why a monoworkspace > stitching together slack, superhuman, notion. Pictured below: 1. Jackson and I both forgot how to post a job to the a16z portal 2. Before sending our contact an email, I've asked an agent to go figure it out. I @-mentioned the agent and Jackson can see it thinking live 3. I've also attached a draft email to send if the agent comes up short. I did this all without leaving my window with Jackson. Compare this to: - Receive Slack message - Open new browser Gmail to search myself - Wait for agent to complete then share ... oops, Jackson says he can't access the agent - Share email draft as a Notion doc or Google doc - Jackson sends email And that's the "happy path", there's lots of potential for miscommunication when you're using 4+ tools to do a simple task. It's a small thing, but there are a lot of things like that that we take for granted now that we've been dogfooding macro for 18 months (we migrated off of Slack, Notion, Superhuman, Linear).

@Brad08414464 Especially with the amount of in person hacker/arts meetups happening in NYC, the tide is turning away from soulless tech and towards community

the two faces of tech are Steve Jobism and Peter Thielism. tech has reached peak Thielism and will start swinging back toward Jobism, 1970s counterculture, DIY/hacker culture, hippie and humanist ideals, simplicity, creativity, beauty

Pretty neat right? Nice with Aidan

@brian_armstrong Stealth mode building makes no sense in a world where market adoption is biggest hurdle

Operating in stealth mode is almost always a mistake. Talk publicly about what you're building. You’ll build momentum, get real feedback, and someone will reach out with the other half of your idea you didn’t realize you were missing.

What does it mean to build a workspace "for engineers"? Among other things — shortcuts, source code, rust, cmd+k — it means having themes ;) Every IDE has complete themeability. There's a standard set of themes and everybody has their opinion on which theme is best. But the office suite, typically, gives you only light mode. Maybe dark in some product surfaces. At macro.com, [Redacted] (he has no online presence) on our team spent months perfecting this oklch color picker. There's a bunch of math in the theme randomizer to ensure you get a good theme when you hit "random". We even made themes shareable. You can copy it to clipboard, send it in a macro message and someone else can instantly apply it.The only problem with this is Seamus's "lights out" theme that changes ever color to black so it's totally unusable. We didn't have to do this, but that's the point. It's fun. We're having fun ...

For eight years, Peter made his living writing poems for strangers in Washington Square Park. He wore a sign that said ASK ME FOR A POEM. He wrote poems for thousands of people. He learned to sculpt. He started selling sculptures that he made. But over the years, what had felt like the righteous path was starting to feel worn. Making a living as an artist was not getting easier. The risk had been easy to stomach at 26, but much harder at 34. The park was filling up with other poets. Peter decided to become a software engineer. So much of engineering is not about invention, but about revision. Peter knows this. He's written thousands of poems. And when that wasn't working, he spend thousands of hours learning to code. He's redesigned our user interface dozens of times. Each one a little closer to right. Peter is a good engineer because he treats engineering the way he treated poetry: as something that requires care, craft, and revision. Now, Peter works at Macro.

@nate_yiu pdfium is a very performant rendering engine (other than text selection). I think acrobat moved to some JS solution. the version c. 2023 before the redesign was better imo

Chrome is a better PDF reader than Acrobat.

@Benioff @salesforce Nice, good to see SFDC in the arena. Slack's docs are getting good but a bit hard to find

New: Slack CRM. AI on top, salesforce underneath. One pane of glass. 🤯

@karpathy Our asymmetric product bet is that the IDE collapses into the collaboration layer. Repo, team chat, agents, etc., in one db. It's a higher level of abstraction, but it's also more collaborative, and it's fused across categories, and probably shouldn't be called an IDE.

Expectation: the age of the IDE is over Reality: we’re going to need a bigger IDE (imo). It just looks very different because humans now move upwards and program at a higher level - the basic unit of interest is not one file but one agent. It’s still programming.

Macro's entire codebase is now available on Github — from live collaboration markdown crdt's to our superfast email client to our mobile app. The frontend is SolidJS and the backend is Rust. Github Link github.com/macro-inc/macro We've chosen the "BSL 1.1 license" as invented by MariaDB and used by companies like Sentry and CockroachDB. This license means we retain commercial rights for 4 years as of each commit upon which the license converts to AGPLv3 (full open source, copyleft). That time delay exists is to create a viable commercial business yet maintain a maximally open community where people can contribute. 👇 Why did we do this? In short 👇 Your office suite is the core of your company. It's where docs, data, messages and email live. It was forgivable for this to be closed-source and rigid c. 2021. But with tools like Claude Code, it's less and less forgivable. Your workspace should be maximally programmable, extensible, modular and open, while giving you confidence that it's got a commercial entity supporting it. --- It's still early, and we'll be making the experience nicer to contribute. But if you want to be part of the project and contribute code right away, please send me a DM!

@georgevourkas @NotionHQ Give us a try.

Please @NotionHQ make a better mobile app... Thank you

Unified inbox for emails, channels, tasks. Split into signal and noise tabs. github.com/macro-inc/macr…

@heyblake yes

Yes or no A founder should write all the content for a startup's first website?

Prove me you're not AI

@yacineMTB nothing wrong with codex maxxing from time to time

do not use codex max

@tailwiinder this is unironically a good opinion

Lmfaooo

@CliftonSellers your startup needs an OS

You got 5 words Sell me your service