My year abandoning Slack, Notion, and Linear for Alpine

What it’s like to leave tool soup behind for an all‑in‑one workspace

by Josh Johnson - February 25, 2026

After almost a year of living in Alpine, a few themes stand out:

I haven’t felt like I’ve lost anything important from my previous tools. If anything, I’ve gained a stronger sense of coherence in my work.

I’ve spent most of my career living inside a mess of different productivity tools.

At different companies, the exact stack changed - Slack or Teams, Notion or Confluence, Jira or Linear. The feeling was always the same: my work was scattered across tabs, my conversations were detached from the documents and tasks they referenced, and I was doing a lot of manual glue work just to keep everything straight.

Almost a year ago, I moved my workday into Alpine (although a bit through a forcing function - I work here!). Since then, I haven’t missed that old tool soup at all.

This is what it’s been like to spend a year working inside one integrated workspace, why I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything by leaving my previous tools behind, and why I think this way of working is where productivity is headed.

Life before Alpine: fragmentation as a feature

In previous roles, I bounced between different combinations of tools: Slack plus Notion, or Teams plus Confluence, plus Jira or Linear for tasks. I’ve been through a few migrations, too. We’d switch from one wiki to another, or from one task system to something “better.”

In what they’ve set out to do, all of those tools did their jobs well.

Chat apps were great at real-time communication. Docs tools were great at storing and sharing documents. Task tools were great at tracking work. But they didn’t really talk to each other in a way that felt natural.

There was always a moment where I’d ask myself:

Even when we tried to “integrate” everything (cross-linking between apps, adding bots, wiring up webhooks), it always felt like a patch. The burden was still on me and my teammates to remember which link belonged where, and to mentally stitch together a story out of scattered tools. I’ve always loved efficiency and collaboration. I genuinely enjoy the work I do, and I get a lot of energy from working with coworkers toward a shared goal. But that fragmentation chipped away at the parts of work I love most.

When your tools don’t fit together, you end up spending a lot of time being the router instead of being the contributor.

Why integration became my thing

Looking back, I’ve been circling this problem for a long time.

At previous jobs, whenever we had hackdays (all day experiments to try to create something novel), I almost always gravitated toward building integrations. Given a free day or two to work on anything, I would:

I can’t tell if I’m embarrassed or proud of these demos (I think proud), but here’s a few samples:

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I didn’t think of it as a career theme at the time. I just wanted work to feel smoother - for myself and for my teammates. My last role before Alpine made that pattern click into place.

I worked at Beeper, a product whose entire mission is to bring all of your chats into one interface. It’s a direct response to the fragmentation of messaging: different apps, different protocols, different silos. Using and building Beeper made it really obvious how much fragmentation degrades your day‑to‑day experience - not just at work, but even in how you talk to friends and family.

Beeper was the first time I realized: I care a lot about unified experiences. I like working on things that make fragmented, frustrating workflows feel simple and coherent. When I found Alpine, it felt like that same instinct applied to my work life. Instead of trying to glue separate tools together, Alpine takes the more opinionated route: bring chat, docs, and tasks into the same place, and design them to work together from the start.

The first “Oh this is different” moments

When I joined Alpine, Caleb had already taken the product a long way. I was stepping into something that already worked. In those first weeks, a few small interactions made it clear this wasn’t just “Slack plus Notion in one tab.” The very first aha moment came on day one.

I wanted to share a document with Caleb in chat. I dropped the link in, and instead of just a plain URL, Alpine popped in an inline preview of the doc. Caleb could see what it was, click into it, and keep the context of the conversation, all without leaving Alpine.

This changes the feel of collaboration. You aren’t bouncing between a chat app and a docs app, you’re just… working together, in one place.

A few days later, I ran into something that initially felt strange: the difference between channels and messages.

I created an engineering “Foundations” channel and started posting WIP documents there. At first, it seemed that I treated it like a normal chat channel. It quickly became obvious that channels are more like discussion boards or forums than group DMs. I know previous users of Meta’s Workplace are familiar with this, but it was a new concept to me.

Instead of a stream of ephemeral messages, we had focused posts with their own discussions, attached docs, and clear audiences. It reduced the fluff that usually piles up in chat, and made it easier to find and re‑enter important conversations. All the while, I didn’t have to leave Alpine to see the work behind those posts. The docs were right there, in context.

Another shift came with Peek. I realized how much I relied on the ability to reference a chat or leave comments on a document while actively working inside another document. Peek let me pull in just the right amount of context without the usual browser tab shuffle or window‑Tetris across multiple monitors. Instead of rearranging my OS windows just to compare two things, I could stay inside Alpine and bring what I needed to me.

A day in the life inside one workspace

Fast‑forward a bit, and Alpine naturally became the place where my entire workday happens.

One of the features that helped solidify that was the home feed.

When the first version landed around June 16, it immediately became part of my daily rhythm. Once or twice a day, I skim the feed to see what’s happening across the space: new posts, active discussions, documents being updated. The key difference is that I don’t need to subscribe to everything or drown in notifications just to stay informed. The home feed gives me a low‑pressure overview of what’s going on, so I can choose when to dive deeper.

Project planning is another area where I felt a clear shift. It is incredibly satisfying to create tasks and subtasks in Alpine. When I’m ready to break down a project, I can just start typing ideas like I’m writing a simple todo list. Those lines naturally turn into structured tasks, with all the power you’d expect from a task system, but the experience of entering them feels as lightweight as jotting notes in a document.

That matters because, in other tools, there’s often a friction point between “thinking” and “tracking.” I’d open a doc first to think out loud, then manually convert pieces into tasks in another system. With Alpine, that gap is much smaller. Planning feels like a continuation of writing, instead of a context switch into a different tool.

Then there’s the editor. Back in December, I was working on a shot list for our launch video while traveling. I was in an airport, on my phone, translating a storyboard into a checklist of individual shots we needed.

Normally, that’s the kind of work I’d rather do at my desk, with a monitor and lots of space. However, the dynamic editor made the experience feel surprisingly comfortable. It adapted to the constraints of my setup without making me feel cramped, and the checklist‑style workflow felt natural inside the document.

It’s a subtle thing, but it changes how willing I am to jump into real work when I’m not in my ideal environment.

Rethinking threads and discussions

One of the questions I get most often is: “Don’t you miss Slack threads?”

The honest answer is: I don’t.

The way Alpine is structured, threads aren’t really necessary in the same way. If I want feedback on something and expect a focused discussion, that’s a perfect use case for a post in a channel.

Instead of starting a throwaway message thread that’s hard to find later, I create a post aimed at a specific audience. That post can reference documents, tasks, and context from across Alpine, and the entire conversation stays attached to a single channel instead of vanishing into the scrollback.

This changes how I think about communication at work. I still have quick, lightweight conversations in messages when I need them, but for anything with real substance or ongoing relevance, I reach for posts and channels. It keeps important discussions from being buried and makes it much easier to come back later and understand what we decided and why.

Bringing my old world along

Even though Alpine has been my primary workspace for almost a year, I still have history elsewhere.

I’ve used Notion for a long time for side projects: design documents, architecture notes, future project ideas, and various personal experiments.

We’re soon launching a Notion importer, and being able to bring that entire history into Alpine means those old ideas don’t have to live in a separate silo anymore. They become first‑class citizens in the same space where I’m chatting with coworkers, planning projects, and writing new docs.

Since Alpine layers powerful tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, and rich mentions on top of everything, importing those notes doesn’t just move them - it makes them more useful. I can reference them in new documents, pull them into planning, or ask questions across my entire body of work.

It feels less like I’m abandoning my old tools and more like I’m graduating them into a better environment.

Why is this the future of productivity?

I’m obviously biased. I work at Alpine, I help build this product, and I care a lot about what we’re trying to do. My enthusiasm isn’t just “I like the thing my team is shipping.” It’s tied to a pattern that’s followed me through every job I’ve had: fighting fragmentation, trying to make scattered tools feel like one coherent environment, and wanting the day‑to‑day act of working with other people to feel less brittle and more fluid. This is not just a software-company problem. I’ve heard this from friends across industries - construction, higher education, business, marketing, you name it!

If my experience is any indication, the future of productivity isn’t a bigger stack of specialized apps or ever‑smarter integrations between them. It’s one place where communication, documentation, and execution naturally compound instead of competing for your attention. That’s what Alpine has become for me: not another tool in the pile, but the home where my work actually lives.