Lakeside to Learning Curve: The 2026 Vyking Workation Begins

Day One: Arrival at Lake Längsee 

Carinthia, Austria's southernmost province, is sometimes called the land of a thousand lakes, and it earns the name. Tucked between the Alps and the Karavanke range along the Slovenian border, the region is known for water clean enough to drink, for slow, unhurried days built around lake and mountain, and for a landscape where the modern world seems to have taken a wrong turn. It was here, on the  shore of Lake Längsee, that 38 Vykings from more than a dozen countries gathered for its 2026 workation. 

Home for the week was Stift St. Georgen am Längsee, a Benedictine abbey founded somewhere between 1002 and 1008. Walk its courtyards today, and it is easy to feel the weight of all those centuries of people arriving, working and building something together in this one quiet spot on the lake. It felt like exactly the right place for a remote team to do the same. 

And arrive they did. Vykings landed throughout Monday afternoon and evening, arriving by plane, car and train from over 12 countries, some with a journey of more than 21 hours behind them by the time they finally reached the abbey gates. For a business that runs almost entirely on video calls and shared documents, there is something quietly emotional about that first moment of seeing colleagues in the flesh, the names behind the Teams messages and the faces behind the little squares on a screen suddenly standing in front of you with a bag over their shoulder, a big smile on their face, and a long journey behind them.

There was no agenda beyond that, and deliberately so. Day one had no workshops, no sessions, nothing to prepare for. It was built simply for people to land, settle and reconnect, which for a team scattered across so many time zones is no small gift in itself. As the afternoon warmed up, the lake did most of the work. Vykings peeled off in smaller groups for a swim in Längsee, the water cool and clear against the August heat, the abbey's spires rising behind the treeline as a reminder of just how far from their home offices everyone was. Others took the more scenic route, wandering the grounds and the lakeside paths, some catching up properly for the first time in months. 

By early evening the whole group had drifted back together for welcome beers on the grounds and then dinner, long tables outside in the last of the light, the kind of unhurried, overlapping conversation that a video call never quite manages. When your job lives mostly in a chat window, it's easy to forget the person behind it. An evening like this brings that back. By the time the plates were cleared, colleagues felt like close friends again, not just names on a screen. It was a great way to start a week. 

Day Two: The Claude Workshop That Filled the Day 

Where Day One had no agenda at all, Day Two had one that ran from breakfast to late afternoon, and it was worth every hour. Laptops open, chairs arranged in one of the abbey's meeting rooms, rolling countryside doing its best impression of a screensaver through the windows behind us, and the whole day given over to one subject: AI, and specifically how Vyking already uses Claude, and how the rest of us can stop firing off three-word prompts and hoping for genius back. 

Vyking's CEO, Franz, took the morning reins, walking the room through what a large language model actually is, how Claude's context window works, and what all those headline "billions of parameters" do and don't tell you. From there it moved from prompting to agents, tracing the shift from carefully wording a single question to handing Claude a goal and letting it plan, use tools and iterate on its own, roughly the way you'd trust a very capable new colleague who never needs a coffee break. 

The afternoon got more specifically about us, which is always the good part. First came some welcome clarity on the vocabulary that trips people up constantly. Skills, connectors and plugins are three different things, and it's an easy mix-up to make. Then came the chat-versus-Cowork question that comes up in nearly every second conversation: chat is for a quick, bounded question, Cowork is for handing off a real outcome and coming back later to something finished. Just as useful, if a little less exciting to write home about, were the habits that actually decide whether any of this goes well day to day. Be specific about the output you want. Scope file access to what the task needs, not the whole shared drive. And treat a first draft as a strong starting point, not gospel. 

From there the room split in two. Developers went deep on Claude Code, working a real change end to end and running actual tests rather than taking a plausible-looking answer on faith, while everyone else worked through Cowork and Projects, no code required. Both tracks then folded into small mixed teams, captained by five of Vyking's most fluent Claude users, Ion, Marko, Thomas, James and Franz, and set loose to sketch out real use cases they could bring straight into their day-to-day work. Rather than having the captains move from table to table, each group worked through the ideas together, throwing out suggestions, challenging them and shaping the strongest ones through open discussion. By late afternoon, a handful of volunteers presented to the room, each one showcasing a new skill they'd built and exactly how they planned to put it to use. 

By early evening, a few headed back down to the lake for a swim or a run along the shore. A lot of the group turned out for a five-a-side and game of handball followed by a team dinner and, once again, a few evening beers. After a full day of new ideas, an early night felt like exactly the right call. 

The shape of the week was already clear: a workation that takes both halves of the word seriously.