Introducing Merlin: Rethinking Agents in Collaborative Workspaces

Introducing Merlin, a team member that helps your team work as one.

Agents are still a single-player game

Nowadays coding agents like Claude Code and Codex have become genuinely good. You can point one at a codebase and it will plan the change, run the tests and open the PR. End to end, with no human involvement needed.

Yet they are still built for one person at one terminal. The agent on your laptop knows whatever you remembered to paste in, and it can't get input from others in your team. But the context of team work lives somewhere else: in the thread where a customer complaint got triaged, or the comment where the PM explained why the deadline moved. We end up having to copy that input into our own agent and become a middleman. Besides that, everything you teach your agent only stays with you. Each person gets faster alone, but the team does not, because none of it leaves the laptop it was learned on.

We built Merlin so the agent is part of the team rather than a tool each member uses alone. Here’s how we’re going about doing it:

Bring the agent to the team, not the team to the agent. Teams have spent years settling into collaboration tools like Slack, Linear and GitHub, and they should not have to move into yet another tool to work with an agent. So a request is a message in a thread, and the result lands in the same thread, where a colleague can correct an assumption or take the next step.

Use the agents the team already has. Your team members already run Claude Code or Codex, with their own environment, MCP servers and skills, on a plan they already pay for. Merlin is a thin layer over those agents, and a better one can always be swapped in when it comes along. No vendor lock-in and no extra bill.

One agent, not a cast. Some products may let you create a roster of named agents, each one with a role. We think it is over-engineering. Specialization is a limit of humans, not of agents: one with the right context can do the research, draft the announcement and open the PR at the same time. So a team should get one agent, reached the same way everywhere, and everything it learns lands in one place.

Meet Merlin

We think Merlin is that one agent.

Merlin joins the Slack channels you choose. @mention it in a thread and it reads the thread, does the work and answers in the same place. Delegate it a Linear issue and it reads the issue and its comments, moves the issue along, and reports back as a comment. Set a schedule, and routine work like a weekly progress update happens on its own and lands in the channel.

The work runs on your team's own machines. A small desktop app connects a member's device to the workspace, and Merlin drives the Claude Code and Codex installs already there, in their real environment, on that member's own plan.

Everything it does, it does in the open, where the whole team can watch and steer. The skills, schedules and devices one member sets up can be shared with the whole workspace with a single switch, and shared memory carries decisions and conventions from one conversation to the next.

Work as one

In the legend, Merlin was never the strongest knight at the Round Table. He was the advisor, who held the context, saw the whole board, and made a fellowship of exceptional individuals act as one. That is the role we hope Merlin can play in your team, not yet another interface to manage, but the one who works in the tools you already use and knows what everyone knows.

This is just the start. Slack, Linear and GitHub are the first surfaces, and more will follow. We know this is a long journey, and we will share what we learn as we go.

Every workspace starts with a 14-day Team trial, no card required. See pricing for the plans. Get started with your Slack workspace and download the desktop app for the machine that runs your agents. The docs walk through how Merlin works and what teams use it for, and new surfaces and features land in the changelog.

If you would like to shape where Merlin goes next and help us work out what working as one looks like, sign up today at usemerlin.ai, follow us on X, and bring your agents to the team.