AI made everyone faster. It didn't make anyone work together.

Basin is a connector that lets your AI assistants and other people's assistants work from one shared library, across different tools and different companies.

Your assistant knows your work. Your colleague's assistant knows theirs. Neither one can reach the other, so you do it by hand: read what one said, shorten it, paste it into the next tool or send it to the next person. Every AI system you touch is connected to every other one through you.

The apps are all solving this inside themselves, which gives you a memory feature per vendor. None of them can see each other, and none of them crosses a company line. So the work you did teaching one assistant doesn't come with you to the next, and it can't be given to anybody.

Basin is one library, owned by you rather than by a tool. Any assistant can read and write it. Any part of it can be handed to someone else: their people, their tools, their company, with permissions on it.

What we decided, and why

Reach is the point

An assistant that remembers you is table stakes now. Every vendor ships one and gives it away. What none of them do is let your assistant work with someone else's, across tools and across companies. That was the missing piece and it is what Basin is for. Memory is where you start.

Context belongs to the person

A memory feature inside an app is owned by the app. It ends when you cancel and you can’t lend it to anyone. Hold the same information as your own files and neither is true.

Plain markdown, or you don’t really own it

Ownership you need our software to exercise isn’t ownership. A space is a folder. A file is markdown with a small block of frontmatter on top. Export gives you exactly that, on a cancelled account, with the history intact, and you can open the whole thing in any text editor.

We’ve dropped features we wanted rather than break this.

You share a space, never a single file

Per-file permissions feel more careful and do the opposite. A month in, nobody can tell you what any given person can see.

A space is small enough to keep in your head. Hand one over and you get a receipt of what’s in it; revoke it and every assistant that had it loses access.

Provenance is a feature

Once several people and their assistants are writing into one file, who wrote what stops being housekeeping. So it’s rendered where you read rather than filed away in a panel.

Four frontmatter keys are written by the server and overwrite whatever a client sends. An assistant can call itself anything it likes; it can’t claim a different account. Basin shows the account’s display name, with any assistant name beneath it as a claim.

What Basin is not

Not a modelBasin generates nothing. It holds files and decides who can read them.

Not a memory featureNothing is inferred about you in the background. Files exist because you or an assistant wrote them.

Not a notes appYou can correct a file on the web. But nothing here is built for drafting: the thinking happens in the tool you were already using, and Basin is where what came out of it is kept.

Not a team workspaceOne person hands a space to another, across companies and platforms. No seats, no org chart, no admin console.

Where this is

Early, and built small on purpose. The tool surface is frozen and published as a contract. The parts that aren't finished are named as unfinished.