Built in Barcelona, by one knowledge worker, for the rest of us.
The person
I've done the full circle in tech: finance, strategy, sales, product marketing, product, and engineering. Every one of those seats was knowledge work: reading, thinking, and producing documents that other people act on. Safata is built from what they had in common.
What they had in common was the shape of a bad week. The information exists but is scattered across four systems and one folder. The analysis is twenty minutes of thinking and three hours of assembling. The deliverable has to be a real document, in a real format, that someone senior will read on a phone. And none of it is hard, exactly. It's just relentless.
Safata is the agent I wanted at that desk. The cases on the front page aren't a feature list I worked backwards from. They're what was in those weeks.
The bet
I don't believe agents replace knowledge workers any time soon. There are too many bottlenecks that aren't about capability: context that lives in someone's head, judgment about what matters, accountability for being wrong, and taste. Every one of those is a human holding something the model doesn't have.
What I do believe is that a person working with an agent produces faster and better outcomes than either alone, and that the gap between those two is going to be the difference between a good decade and a bad one for a lot of people. Everything about how Safata is built follows from that bet, including the parts that cost me something.
Running locally on your own keys is slower to adopt than an account and a credit card. Shipping no telemetry means I'm blind to what breaks. Refusing to build usage detection means the commercial boundary rests on procurement rather than enforcement. Each of those is a real cost I'm choosing, because a tool that sits this close to your work has to be one you can be relaxed about, including about me. If I stopped tomorrow, everything Safata made for you is an ordinary file on your own disk, and your keys are your own.
The name
Safata is Catalan for tray: the tray that finished work lands on. It's an unglamorous word for an unglamorous promise, which is roughly the idea: you asked for something, and here it is, done, on a real tray, in a real format, on your own desk.
Elsewhere
I write about knowledge work and where this technology is actually going at The Knowledge Worker. It's the long-form version of the point of view on the front page, and it predates the product.
If you want to argue with the bet, the licence, the local-first position, or the parts of the product that don't exist yet, I’d rather hear it now than after launch.
Victor Zhang · Barcelona
victorzhang.io · LinkedIn · The Knowledge Worker · hello@safata.ai