Why Does Basecamp Treat Coding Agents Like Coworkers?

David Heinemeier Hansson says Basecamp has started putting coding agents inside the product and treating them as coworkers. An agent gets a task on a to-do or on a card and does the work there. A collaboration tool built for asynchronous communication fits that better than a chat-style harness. Chat was the original shape of these tools, and it invites you to sit and wait for a reply. A Basecamp to-do does not. You hand it over and you do not expect to hear back immediately.

He is also building an Omabot that does autonomous development on Omarchy on a schedule, working through to-dos, pull requests, and issues, then emails him with the Hey command-line tool. One of those emails listed 12 pull requests that were ready to ship or worth closing. He makes the final call. He still runs several harnesses at once, Claude in one pane and Codex in another, and he does not think the final form of the harness is settled.