The latest articles on DEV Community by Ruben Flam (@rubenflam). https://dev.to/rubenflam https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3927884%2Fce52ac8d-da05-4338-bf06-4d66bea154d4.jpeg https://dev.to/rubenflam en Ruben Flam Tue, 12 May 2026 19:48:26 +0000 https://dev.to/rubenflam/we-didnt-build-an-ai-agent-we-built-a-shell-12hf https://dev.to/rubenflam/we-didnt-build-an-ai-agent-we-built-a-shell-12hf <p>Look around. Everyone is busy building another AI agent right now but we decided to go a different route and built an alternative to Slack instead. We wanted a fast, loud, wide-awake room for your team, but when it came to the AI part we made a concious choice not to roll our own agent or just wrap some API and call it a feature. </p> <p>We built a shell.</p> <p>The reason for this is pretty simple. The AI space is moving way too fast, where new models are born, hyped up and become obsolete before the season even changes. If you try to build a chat app around a proprietary bot you're basically building a tomb that ties your team to yesterdays tech.</p> <p>Instead we looked at how elite teams are actually working right now. You have your channels and your threads in one window, and then you have Claude Code running in a terminal somewhere else completly disconnected from the conversation. </p> <p>So we decided to just bring the terminal into the chat.</p> <p>Ano is team chat for the people who've noticed that the way we work is changing fast. It has channels, threads and DMs like your team already knows by heart, but under the hood it's an actual shell where the world's best agents can run natively. Claude Code is built right in, so you just hit one key and it opens with the channel's context ready to run any CLI, any tool or any script your team has wired up. The result just pipes back into the right channel before you've finished your coffee.</p> <p>The agent pitches in next to the people so you can see what it does, stop it or guide it while it shares the exact same context as the humans in the channel. We aren't competing with the frontier models, we're really just giving them a place to sit and a desk in your office.</p> <p>Your tools stay sharp and your chat stays fast, with nothing left rotting between tabs.</p> <p>Ruben Flam<br> Founder, Ano<br> <a href="https://ano.chat" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://ano.chat</a></p> ai productivity showdev startup Ruben Flam Tue, 12 May 2026 19:46:27 +0000 https://dev.to/rubenflam/hi-4983 https://dev.to/rubenflam/hi-4983