Every Greek city had an agora. It was not a building but an open square at the heart of the city, where people traded, argued, voted and met. Nobody designed the agora for one person. It was shaped by everyone who used it, and it served each of them differently. A merchant saw a market. A citizen saw a forum. A visitor saw the city itself.
Our name comes from Attalus I, who turned Pergamon from a hilltop fortress into one of the great centers of the ancient world by backing the people who made things. His dynasty built for the public. His son, Attalus II, gave Athens a long colonnade in its agora, the Stoa of Attalus, which still stands there today, rebuilt in the 1950s. A place built by its makers, and made useful by the people who gather in it. That is the idea behind Attalu, and it is why the part of our product where people meet software is called The Agora.
In the age of mega apps
Imagine a computer with no keyboard, no mouse and no menus. Just one button. The computer already knows what you are about to do. It prepares it, shows it to you, and waits. You press the button to approve. That is the whole interface. Every interface ever built is a negotiation between what a person wants and what a machine can do. Menus, shortcuts, settings and search bars are all ways of closing that gap. The one button is what it looks like when the gap disappears. For a moment, it seemed AI would take us there. Instead it took a different turn. We gained a remarkably capable assistant, placed it in a text box, and left the products around it exactly as they were. Now people have to learn the old interface and how to talk to the new one.
Meanwhile, software keeps growing. Companies make products that are already large even larger. Every release adds features, tabs, integrations and settings, until a single product tries to do everything for everyone. This is the mega app. Its power is real, but so is its cost. Every person has to find their own small part of it, and learn to ignore the rest. The interface has not kept up. A new hire and a ten-year power user still open the same layout, the same menus, the same path through the same screens. The product knows more than ever. It still treats every person the same.
We do not think the answer is a bigger product or a better chat box. We think it is a product that adapts to the person using it. We call this adaptive user experience.
In practice, it can take many forms:
- A custom interface for each user. A team lead sees their tickets as a calendar, an engineer sees a board, and both are using the same product.
- Personal flows. New paths through the product, created by the user or opened up for them, that skip what they never need.
- A smarter cursor. One that carries context and actions with it, instead of sending you back to a menu every time.
These are examples, not the full list. What matters is the shift: the product reshapes itself around each person, rather than every person reshaping themselves around the product. But an agora was never lawless. It had architecture, rules and the people who maintained them. The public shaped how the square was used, not whether its columns stood. Adaptive software works the same way. Designers decide what can change and what cannot, and every adaptation happens within those decisions.
Toward the one button
Attalu is our first step in that direction. In Attalu Studio, designers and developers build the product and set its rules. In The Agora, every user experiences a version of that product shaped around them. It is not the one button yet. But every adaptation brings software a little closer to knowing what a person needs before they have to ask for it. We are early, and we want to build this with the people who will use it. If that is you, join the beta.
