I wanted Slack to do more, so I built a self-hosted workspace for chat, tasks and knowledge—with agents and MCP up the wazoo.

This started with three things: wanting Slack to do more, a growing resentment of SaaS bills, and getting slightly too obsessed with self-hosting. A conversation would happen in chat, the task would end up somewhere else, and the explanation behind it would get lost. I wanted those things to live together, in something I could run and change myself. So I’m building Deft. It’s an open-source workspace with chat, tasks, notes, knowledge and a calendar. Here's a demo video walkthrough (https://youtu.be/7z9EH4c9k2o?si=EcM4UgGjniZodbAp). The video walks through a discussion becoming useful project knowledge and work, including the optional AI features. It uses demo data. A few things worth knowing before you try it: • Self-hosted with Docker Compose. Prebuilt images currently target Linux amd64. • AGPL-3.0. The code is available to inspect and modify. • The core workspace works without an AI provider. AI and ChatGPT/Claude connectivity are optional; connecting external providers means sharing the relevant context with them. • It’s alpha. I’m looking for people willing to try it with a small project and tell me where it falls short. Next I’m also working on AuthorKit, so you can build your own apps like a custom CRM, an internal tracker or a workflow tool—and sideload them into Deft. The idea is to reuse Deft’s tasks, permissions and agent access instead of starting another disconnected app from scratch. The CRM is the first full example I’m building this way and will be ready in the next week or so. It’s still experimental, but I want “I wish Deft did this” to be something you can act on yourself. I’m building this with substantial help from Codex. Apparently my response to having too many software subscriptions was to give myself software to maintain. If you’ve also wanted Slack to do a bit more and charge you a bit less I’d love for you to try Deft with a small project. Tell me what’s missing, what gets in your way, and what would make it worth keeping on your server. GitHub (https://github.com/Maneek21/Deft) · Installation guide (https://deft.ing/docs/quick-start/)