Another short firm by Austin Barrón, this time on the design of email in Macro. Yes, I know, another email client? Let me explain why this deserves to exist. Many attempts have been made to make email better. Front c. 2014 tried to make email better for support with shared inboxes with commenting for your team. But the user interface was pretty cluttered and I didn't like using it for my main email client. The shortcuts were worse than Gmail. And because I didn't like using it as my main client, nor did the team, they failed to get us out of Gmail/Superhuman. They might have built a great team experience, but it was a weird blend of quasi-horizontal SaaS (Superhuman) and quasi-vertical (Intercom). Superhuman c. 2018 tried to make email fast and premium. Priced at $30/m. Intentionally offering minimal bloat. Instead of more features than Gmail, like Front, how about less features? Superhuman asked: what if you were a horse with blinders on? And it's great. It's great for founders, VCs and others who need to triage and respond to lots of emails. Basically, it's good for single-player prosumer users who are not doing super complex email work; they're just using email like text messaging. But it doesn't have multi-inbox accounts and it's not great for multi-tasking (e.g. writing an email while cross-referencing to multiple other emails). Outlook and Apple Mail are good because they're fast and native/native-feeling, and have multi-inbox. But they don't have very good AI or shortcuts. Notion Mail was the first try at bringing mail into an all-in-one platform. After years of staying *more* focused than Coda, ClickUp, etc., Notion made a big splash a few years ago with this. Except... it wasn't so "notion" at all. It was a separate app developed by new employees (my understanding, with no insider info, is that these were the folks who made Skiff, which was great btw). With email in Macro — and notice I don't call it "Macro Mail" — we've tried to bring the best of a lot of these tools into one app. Multi-inbox, great AI compose within AI chat, agents that can read everything across inboxes, a sleek interface, keyboard shortcuts, and good support cross-device. TBH I don't think we've fully realized mobile speed and Superhuman-level sleekness yet, but we're asymptotically approaching that... The main benefit of email in Macro is that it's integrated with everything else. - Get an email from a customer? Just click "task" to instantly assign it to an engineer and find out about any duplicate tasks. - In AI chat, doing some research, but now you want to draft and send off an email? No need to leave; email gets embedded *within* the chat interface. - Want to share the email with a colleague, or chat about it? In Superhuman Slack, you're awkwardly sending a screenshot of the email. In Macro, just "Share" it to a channel to give the full chain. - Native "Splits" [cmd \] for multi-tasking - see 2, 3 windows at a time - Open source

We just released docs.macro.com! The thing that I really want to hit home with our docs, our marketing, our site, is how much effort we've put into all of our modules. Because a natural pushback against any all-in-one solution is that it's master of none. And that used to be true (see: ClickUp, Monday, etc.). But coding agents have changed the game. If you have taste and patience, and a big token budget, big things are possible without sacrificing on quality. That's our bet at least. I think every open source project needs great documentation. It's even more important now with agents so they can read the docs to answer user questions, and for AEO and SEO. Great docs are also important to build trust with users. When we didn't have it, some guy on X randomly made docs and it got hundreds of views and drove a lot of traffic to us! That was my wake up call last week that we needed better docs. Thanks Julia for doing v1 and Fabel with some editorial work. Please let us know if you have any questions that aren't covered in the docs, we're still working out the kinks this week. It's still v1, but I'm proud of it. docs.macro.com

Apparently we've shipped AI-powered duplicate detection in Macro Tasks. I just found out when I created a task and turns out Eric Hayes already created a task for the same thing. It works by vectorizing all your tasks and finding similar ones to suggest duplicates, then flagging this in the UI. Here's how it looks (screenshot below). The other benefit of Macro tasks, as I've talked about a lot here, is that it's deeply linked to emails, channels, docs and other tasks (unlike traditional "task manager" which lives in its own box). Try it at macro.com

Macro is now fully open source! This is a big leap for the open source productivity software category. As a reminder, Macro = "unified system for work". Email, messaging, tasks, docs, calls, files and crm. All of this in lives one interface, with unified search and agents that can access everything in one context. Now that Macro is open source, we think this makes even harder to stomach running your company or team on Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Linear, etc. Vibe coding everything yourself isn't the answer. A proprietary hodgepodge of tools that don't work together isn't the answer. Macro is the answer for what the future of work should look like: humans and agents working together, with all context in one system. github.com/macro-inc/macro Please give our repo a ⭐️ and follow our progress!

Macro.com is now fully open source github.com/macro-inc/macro. Please give us a star and follow along!

Custom shareable themes in Macro are pretty cool. As long as you don't click flashbang...

Me: we need to release every day. We're moving too slow. Teo: we can't just do that. Me: why not? Teo: *reasons* *more reasons* *bonus reasons*. Me: 😡👿 I am urgent founder. Teo is patient CTO. This is me and Teo's relationship. In this video we discuss "should we release every day"? I felt we were moving too slow. We were releasing once every few weeks, leaving DEV and PROD in very different states. Every release required a huge QA cycle. I wanted to ship daily. --- AI is making the first 80% of building anything, very fast. And as a CEO, you often don't see the last bit, or it seems unimportant. Or maybe you don't understand why we can't ship v1 and make it better later. It's really hard to know whether your company doesn't have a sense of urgency, or is making up false hesitations to not JUST DO IT, or there are actually blockers going on. I ended up getting my way. We do release every day now, and we have for the past few months. Things are moving much faster! But we also followed Teo's process to get there. And we never automated the deploys. --- A team is a balance of dispositions and you need a variety. Teo and me probably trend towards extremes we wouldn't otherwise *actually* hold if we were making the decision ourselves.

We recently released meetings in Macro it's been pretty cool to have all our standups recorded, vectorized and available to our AI agents. We're auto-naming the call, storing the transcript and the recording and creating an AI summary. Yes, you could do this with Granola Meet Huddles in Slack. But it's a lot that can go wrong, or permissions can be messed up, some meetings wont get logged (e.g. on mobile). In Macro, by default, calls are shared with your team and added to team-level memory. You can turn this off for sensitive meetings that shouldn't be shared with the team. But it's an important design decision that this is the default... if it's not, you can bet your calls won't get logged for the most part. It's super cool! Now I can ask our agents, or check my "What's going on" dashboard and it includes all of the meetings, including summaries of ones I didn't attend. Here's 3 of my recent meetings:

We're still figuring out what the best way to show replies is. Slack puts everything in a side panel which makes it hard to find things. Discord makes everything a new message in the main chat. You can "quote" things to link to the original message but there's no "true" threading. iMessage does the same as Discord, but with a nice long-press UI that shows you the full thread. I think it's good for friend group chats but not deep technical conversations. For that I think Slack's UI is better. Reddit — which you probably don't think of as chat — does infinite nesting. It's like Slack, but n levels deep not 1 level deep. And instead of a side panel, nesting is displayed by tabbing replies over a bit. Reddit is the most powerful, obviously. But perhaps too powerful for "chat". But maybe not... I've often felt myself wishing for multiple levels in Slack. I think infinite nesting might be best for detailed technical conversations. This is kind of a one-way door decision: if we ship infinite nesting then it's impossible to revert without destroying user data or doing something weird. We might ship infinite nesting just for our team and see how it feels. What do you think?

We're Calling It a Soft Launch After years of building, Macro is officially open to the world today. We're calling it a "soft launch", because we're being honest. The product isn't perfect yet. But it's already better than the patchwork of tools most engineering teams are stuck with, and we think it's time for other people to try it. The Problem We Couldn't Unsee If you're an engineer at a startup, your workday probably looks something like this: Slack in one tab, email in another, Notion in a third, Linear in a fourth, Google Docs in a fifth, and ten more miscellaneous tabs lined up after that. You spend hours just context-switching between tools that were never designed to work together. We tried everything. Slack was fine for chatting but terrible for anything structured. Notion was powerful but sluggish and never felt like it was built for engineers. Linear was clean but only solved one piece of the puzzle. Superhuman made email faster but didn't solve the fundamental problem: your email still lived in a completely different universe from your tasks, your docs, and your team conversations. None of them are bad products. They just never added up to something cohesive. You'd stitch together six or seven tools with integrations and workarounds, and the result was always a fragmented mess that ate your focus and slowed you down. We got tired of it. So we built Macro. One Tab to Close Ten Macro is the unified workspace — email, docs, tasks, team chat, canvas, code, and agents, all in a single interface. Same text editor everywhere. Same keyboard shortcuts. Same permissions model. One search that reaches across everything. The backend is Rust because we wanted something fast and we wanted a codebase that could scale without becoming a maintenance nightmare. The source code is available, so you don't have to worry about being locked into a tool you can't inspect or extend. We use Macro to build Macro. Every channel message, every doc, every task, every email at our company runs through the product. Our greatest strength is that we're shipping the tool that we reach for every single day. Why "Soft Launch" Building an entire office suite from the ground up is an enormous undertaking. There are still rough edges and some features are more polished than others. We're going to ship improvements fast, and some things will break along the way. But even in this state, Macro is a fundamentally better way to work than juggling Slack, Notion, Linear, Gmail, and whatever else you've duct-taped together. The unified experience alone changes how your team operates. When your AI assistant can search across your emails, channels, and documents in one shot, when you can reference a task from a channel message, or draft an email while staring at the relevant doc , that's a different and better way of working. We're not waiting until everything is perfect to let people in. We'd rather build in the open, get real feedback from real teams, and iterate from there. Try It If you're an engineer or run an engineering team and you're tired of the tab graveyard, come try Macro. While it's not perfect, it's available today. We built this for ourselves and now we're building it for you. → macro.com

We hand-coded our own 3D rendering engine for our landing page. This is a crazy thing to do, but not so crazy when you know the people we've hired and our culture. Macro does a lot of things we don't need to do. But why? In this case: 1. three-js would have increased bundle size significantly. 2. We would have had to decide between (a) low-poly for performance or (b) high-poly that would lag many computers. We wanted high poly 3d and a super fast website. But how? SVGs. Without my complete buy in, Bos spent a few days writing our own rendering engine for SVGs. The way it works is that you encode depth in the SVG itself. Bos's tiny 3D engine then performs all the transform and scale math to make that SVG-with-depth-encoding into 3D. Now we get to have our cake and eat it too: A. The equivalent of infinite polygons, at least for our visual style B. Fast page load time and small bundle size Claude wasn't so useful here. This is all biological (Boswellian) compute. But now that it's written, Claude is pretty good at writing animations and encoding depth in SVGs based on the sample code. --- Is this just visual flair, about standing out? Yes, it's about having a unique brand, to an extent. But I think the style of product teardowns we're going to have on the site like the hero one are the actual best way of explaining our offering (we're making more check back soon)... Our teardowns will give the visitor a feel for the user interface while not overwhelming. Real UI is too dense and overwhelming. I come away from many websites not knowing what the company does; not because they didn't say, but because my brain couldn't take it in. It also shows care about what we're building. Usability is our raison d'etre. The "office suite" is an existing category. Everybody already has Microsoft or Google Workspace. We need people to know this is anti-Slop. The only reason to adopt Macro is because it's better: more well-built vs. Slack, Notion, etc. Apple-quality, not Android. --- All of this implicitly requires culture, and speaks to Macro's culture: 0. I needed to set the tone that we care about craft and polish and quality. 1. Bos needed to know that I'd be okay with him spending a few days on this. 1b. It needed to be okay for this to fail. 2. We — the creative team and the founder — all iterated together to make this perfect. The design and brand and copy all needs to be from one hive mind, but it also needs to have the best-in-class artists on each section (copy, layout, svg, 3d, etc.). We read Creative Selection recently and found it really helpful for advancing our culture. More to do!

New in Macro: hover over any @task mention in a message to see status, priority and assignee. It's really nice to have task management tightly integrated with team chat. Before Macro we used Linear, which is a good product. But the Linear was rarely up to date because Slack was the actual source of truth. This is an one example of the new batch of "cohesiveness" features we're shipping over the coming months. Since we own the full product suite — tasks, email, team chat, agents, docs, files — we can build awesome things that you simply can't if you're running Slack-Notion-Google silos.

Asking for help can feel uncomfortable especially when you're surrounded by talented people and worried about how you'll come across. Early in your career, you might find yourself strategically picking who to ask for a review just to avoid the harsh feedback. But the reality is, even the best engineers ship PRs and get notes on them. Here's CTO, Teo, talking about how at a work environment like Macro where people genuinely respect each other, asking for help stops being a weakness and starts being part of the process.

New website just dropped (please help us find rough edges!) macro.com

Do it all- In Macro Macro is the unified system for engineering teams. It brings together your messages, agents, tasks, docs, PRs, and emails in one interface. Engineers are currently drowning in tab chaos. Slack in one window, Notion in another, Gmail in a third. Every context switch costs focus and momentum. Macro is being built to eliminate that friction by collapsing the tools engineers actually live in into one fast interface.

I have met Howard Roark, and his name is {fake user}. Fake user has no formal training in design. Or anything else. To my knowledge, he has no portfolio. Fake user has the "internet phone book" on his desk yet but no online presence. I've seen him use AI only once — a local 7b model in his terminal. When I explain business ideas to him, he gets it fully, but he doesn't care. Fake user is only focused on making great things. Fake user is maybe the most unique and talented design mind we know. His ability to communicate his ideas is limited. But that's because he's on a different level. He shows, not tells. Fake user knows what he's doing. Whether you know what he's doing is the test. Fake user's name is Russell. For now, he works at Macro, and hosts our Blockparty.nyc.

📢 Big update from Macro: #MCP support is here. You can now connect to Macro MCP's using your local agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc). Create tasks. Draft documents. Send emails. Kick off chats. All from a single prompt, without switching apps and while accessing your data that is already stored in Macro. Ask your favorite CLI coding agent or codex to configure himself with this config so you can get started using the new Macro MCP.

Join us in Flatiron this Wednesday 3/25 — we have a new screenprinter in the office, so bring some blanks to print cool designs on. And co-work, and see what we've been up to. luma.com/cy8cjg11?tk=1q98Z3

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).