SEATTLE — March 2, 2026 — Punt Labs today announced biff, an open-source communication tool that lets software engineers message teammates, check presence, see what their AI agents are doing, and broadcast to their team — all without leaving the terminal. Unlike Slack and Discord, which demand a separate window and constant attention, biff runs inside the engineer’s existing Claude Code session as MCP-native slash commands. Engineers type /write @kai the same way they type git push — in flow, with intent, and then move on.
Problem
Software engineers using AI-assisted coding tools like Claude Code are experiencing a step change in productivity. Entire features that once took days now take hours. But every time these engineers need to coordinate with a teammate — asking a question, sharing a diff, requesting a code review — they context-switch to Slack or Discord, tools designed for managers and all-day-online knowledge workers, not for makers in deep focus. Those tools show everything — every channel, every project, every server — regardless of which codebase is open in the terminal right now.
The cost is measurable. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine found that a single interruption costs an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds before a worker returns to the original task. For an engineer shipping three features a day with AI assistance, three Slack interruptions can erase an entire feature’s worth of productive time. Slack’s always-on presence model compounds the problem: even checking for messages breaks flow, and the social expectation of quick replies creates anxiety that degrades concentration even when no message arrives.
The engineers building the future of software — spending their entire day inside a terminal, collaborating with AI agents, iterating at speeds that would have seemed absurd two years ago — have no communication tool that matches how they actually work.
Solution
Biff brings communication into the terminal as slash commands borrowed from the BSD Unix utilities that shipped with every workstation in the 1980s — write, wall, finger, who, and mesg — updated for the MCP era. Ten commands cover messaging, presence, real-time conversation, broadcast, and availability control:
/who— see who’s online, what they’re working on, and where each session is running/write @kai "ready for review"— send a directed message/read— check your inbox when you’re ready/finger @kai— see what someone is working on without interrupting them/talk @kai— start a real-time conversation with instant status bar display/wall "release freeze" 2h— broadcast a time-limited announcement to the team/plan "refactoring auth"— set your status so teammates can see your focus/tty main— name your session for multi-session work/last— view session login/logout history/mesg n— go do-not-disturb;/mesg yto come back
Every command implies intent. There are no channels to monitor, no threads to catch up on, no emoji reactions to parse. The repository is the channel. When you open a project, you see only the teammates and messages for that project. Switch repos, and your communication context switches with you. This is why biff works for focused engineering: the same scoping that keeps your code organized keeps your communication organized. When someone sends you a message, your status bar shows a live indicator — kai:tty1(3) in bold yellow when you have unreads, kai:tty1(0) when caught up. You decide when to engage.
Because biff speaks MCP, agents participate alongside humans as natural members of the team. An autonomous coding agent can /plan what it is working on, /write a human when it needs a decision, and show up in /who alongside everyone else. Workflow hooks tie into the development process: switching branches auto-sets your plan, creating a PR triggers a /wall announcement. Biff is designed for hybrid teams — humans and agents working together — with the same intentional, human-scale communication vocabulary that made BSD utilities great.
Customer Perspective
“I used to mass-quit my Slack channels once a month out of frustration and then guiltily rejoin them. With biff, I just set
/mesg nwhen I’m deep in a problem and/mesg ywhen I come up for air. My teammates can/finger @priyato see what I’m on without interrupting. Now I run three agents alongside my own session —/whoshows all four of us, each with its own plan, and when one of them needs a decision it just/writes me. Last week I shipped more in three days than I used to ship in two weeks, and I didn’t miss a single important message.”— Priya Chandrasekaran, Senior Engineer at a Series B startup
Getting Started
Getting started with biff takes two steps — install it, then enable it in your repo:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/punt-labs/biff/419ac99/install.sh | sh
biff enableThe first command installs the CLI and registers the Claude Code plugin. The second activates biff in the current repository and deploys git hooks for workflow integration. Restart Claude Code, and you are live.
Biff ships with a shared relay on Synadia Cloud, so there is zero infrastructure to provision. Team configuration lives in a .biff file committed to the git repository — the repo is both the codebase and the communication scope. Display names are resolved automatically from GitHub identity. When a teammate clones a repo that has a .biff file, biff connects them to the right team automatically. There is no account to create, no workspace to configure, and no browser to open. Type /who to see your teammates.
Our Perspective
“We built biff because we watched the best engineers in the world disappear into their terminals — shipping at speeds that make the old sprint-and-standup cadence look quaint — and then lose hours every day to communication tools designed for a different era. Slack was built for the open-office, always-online workplace. Biff is built for the deep-focus, AI-accelerated one. We didn’t add a chat feature to the terminal. We resurrected the Unix communication vocabulary —
write,wall,finger,who,mesg— because those commands understood something Slack forgot: communication should be purposeful, not ambient.”— Jim Freeman, Founder, Punt Labs
Biff is open source and available today at github.com/punt-labs/biff. Install with one command, restart Claude Code, and type /who. The core tool and the shared relay are free under the MIT license.
About Punt Labs
Punt Labs builds open-source developer tools for engineers who live in the terminal. Its projects include biff (team communication), quarry (local semantic search), and prfaq (Working Backwards product discovery) — all built as CLI applications and MCP servers that integrate natively with AI coding assistants. Learn more at github.com/punt-labs.