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THE COLUMN · PUBLISHED 2026-02-22 · 5 MIN READ

On not quite replacing Slack

We did not build a better chat app. We built a place for threads to live against the records they belong to.

Every six weeks someone on LinkedIn declares Slack dead and a new chat tool ascendant. We watch those cycles with a mixture of amusement and tiredness, because the problem with operator chat is not the chat. It is that the conversation is detached from the work.

Where the memory leaks

A product launch happens in a channel. The decision to push the date is a thread. The customer response is a DM. The invoice dispute that kicked off the re-plan is an email three weeks later. None of those four threads are attached to the launch itself. Six months later, nobody can tell you why the launch slipped.

THE RITUAL WE CHANGED

In Aixys, every thread lives on a record. A launch has threads; so does a deal; so does an invoice. There is no #product channel that rots.

What that means in practice

  • Presence is per-record, not per-channel. You see who is looking at this deal right now.
  • Every @mention leaves a durable reference — the next person to open the record sees the thread.
  • AI memos are written against the thread AND the record, so questions like "why did we push this?" have an answer six months later.

We are not trying to kill Slack. Slack is great for the rest of the conversation — the lunches, the GIFs, the watercooler. We want the operational conversation — the one with decisions in it — to stop living in a channel and start living on the work.

WRITTEN BY

Mira Okafor

Co-founder · Design

Spent a decade drawing UI that teams never opened twice. Co-founded Aixys to fix the tab problem from the canvas side.

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