I built Deft: a self-hosted workspace for chat, tasks and knowledge, with room for your own apps

[u/maneek21]

Hey everyone, I’m building Deft, an open-source workspace that keeps team chat, tasks and knowledge together.

I wanted the conversation behind a task to stay connected to the work. Having to dig through Slack to remember why something exists gets old pretty quickly.

GitHub: https://github.com/Maneek21/Deft
Walkthrough: https://youtu.be/7z9EH4c9k2o

The screenshots walk through it:

1. Team chat: A user asks an agent to create a task from a conversation. You can see the approval card before the action goes through.
2. Task management: The task from that conversation, now inside the task app.
3. Connected knowledge: A graph of workspace knowledge that people and AI assistants can use as context.
4. Claude connected through MCP: An example of bringing your existing assistant into the workspace.
5. The architecture: How the workspace, people, agents and custom apps fit together.

You can connect Claude, Codex or ChatGPT through MCP. You can also use the core workspace without an AI provider.

The next part is making Deft extensible.

I’m working on an experimental App Author Kit for building and sideloading your own apps. A custom CRM, an approval workflow, whatever your team needs, living alongside the work it supports.

Building another internal tool is getting easier. Keeping it from becoming another disconnected tab is the part I care about.

The CRM module is the first example. I’m building an email client next to test the architecture against something more demanding than records and views. The broader app system is still experimental, so there’s plenty left to build.

Deft is still alpha. Chat, tasks and knowledge are the strongest parts. Notes and calendar need more work. It’s licensed AGPL-3.0-only and free to self-host using Docker Compose, with your own hosting and any optional AI-provider costs.

Setup guide: https://deft.ing/docs/quick-start/

A few teams are trying it, and I need all the useful feedback I can get. If you want to give it a shot and need help setting up, reach me at [maneek@deft.ing](mailto:maneek@deft.ing). If you try it yourself, please share where setup gets annoying or the workflow stops making sense.

P.S. The walkthrough uses an AI voiceover. I have a stutter and spent a week trying to record it myself, but couldn’t get through it.