11 ms·

Anthropic, please make a new Slack

272 points by georgewfraser 6mo ago

anonymouscaller 6mo ago
Slack is in no way a great program (source: use it daily for work), but it seems to me that it works as intended, and developers can already extend it with bots/AI agents. Plus, Claude as an agent is already installable to Slack. For compliance, my company already has a tool that scrapes all slack messages, and archives them for a required amount of years. I'm at a small company, so I assume large corporations have already refined this process. What problem does this solve?
- georgewfraser 6mo ago
  You can only access public channel data, you can't even access that at scale, and Claude needs to be more natively integrated in ways that Slack will never allow.
- mgraczyk 6mo ago
  Slack is $45/user/month Soon you'll be able to write, host, and maintain a fully customizable version for probably 20k/month If you have a lot of employees this makes sense
  - ellg 6mo ago
    If people wanted to do this theyd be self hosting xmpp servers already. No one wants to write and maintain the code and infra for things like this, you are grossly underestimating the effort involved here.
    - ares623 6mo ago
      No no it makes sense. Hypothetical scenario: I, a high-level employee at a company just convinced my boss (or did we convince each other?) to spend $30k/year on Claude/Codex enterprise licenses. So far, the productivity gains have not been there and we're starting to sweat. So, I propose to my boss to build an internal version of $SaaS and call it a win. Galaxy brain. Now some IC somewhere in the company who is at the end of his rope and sees the company as a dead end, sees an opportunity. Why not advocate for this project, get real experience building something greenfield in a brand new domain, strengthen their own resume, and finally have a way out of their strut? It's not like they're gonna stick around maintaining what they built.
    - abujazar 6mo ago
      Most people using Slack, Teams etc. and especially those making purchase decisions have no idea what XMPP is and what it's capable of. Heck, even Facebook used to federate XMPP until they decided to go proprietary. Not in the interest of their users, but because it makes the most money for its shareholders.
    - mgraczyk 6mo ago
      No they wouldn't have Nobody will write this, AI will write the entire thing. You don't need many people to maintain it
  - matharmin 6mo ago
    What features are you using that the $18/user/month plan doesn't cover?
    - mgraczyk 6mo ago
      I don't pay for slack any more, I just picked the price of their enterprise plan. Large users probably get big discounts but it doesn't matter, the cutoff where this makes sense financially is probably around 4000 employees even at $10/seat
    - apublicfrog 6mo ago
      The article mentions some sort of legal audit reasons that the author is of the opinion that any reasonably sized company needs. These features are apparently only on the expensive plan.
  - bandrami 6mo ago
    We've had xmpp for decades; the issue is that companies don't want to be responsible for it not that they can't do it
- mogili1 6mo ago
  Slack's API rate limits and design make it difficult to replicate the data within Slack to a data store that can then be used to provide context to AI agents. You are forced to use their MCP and their realtime search APIs, which don't work very well/not performant and may require additional licensing.
andymadson 6mo ago
I had high hopes for Claude's interactive app integrations, including Slack, but it leaves MUCH to be desired and doesn't really solve for agentic access patterns.
dbt00 6mo ago
"A slack that doesn't suck" doesn't exist, and whoever thinks Anthropic of all people are going to build that has no idea how this is going to work. Slack has massive lock in due to cross-organization connections. The only way you're going to get people off slack is to build a 10x better mode for collaboration than river of shit chat, and while such models probably exist, you also have to convince people that they are better. I wish whomever tries this the best of luck.
- pedalpete 6mo ago
  How google hasn't been able to do this with messenger is beyond me. The external partners on our slack are almost all logged in via gmail or other google workspace. We are on google workspace as well.
  - riwsky 6mo ago
    cries in google wave
    - hunterpayne 6mo ago
      +1, google wave might have been the best thing Google ever made.
  - QuercusMax 6mo ago
    Google decided to build a new chat app every two years instead of keeping the good bits of the original chat app they had and evolving it. It was endlessly frustrating to me when I was at Google. Google's security team ended up banning Slack access after several teams started expensing it. It doesn't seem like building something that works well would be that hard; we've had nearly 40 years to learn from IRC, AIM, and others. Why can't I run my own chat client that does what I want? Oh, because you gotta lock people in. Sucks.
    - 3eb7988a1663 6mo ago
      It is impossible to believe the self-own on Google's messaging platforms. At one point, it seemed that all of my acquaintances used Google Talk. Then years of shutting down perfectly working applications, sometimes without any real user porting. There were even identically named products existing at the same time. However, I am sure a few Googlers got some tasty promotions out of the mess, so it was all worth poisoning the well.
etchalon 6mo ago
Just use one of the many chat products that doesn't have the same access limitations as Slack? Or, you know, Vibe code your own. People are so weird.
- petercooper 6mo ago
  Or, you know, Vibe code your own. Right. If these tools are so good (and they are) there should be numerous better-than-Slack apps by now that let you do exactly what you want. It doesn't take Anthropic to make it. (At our company, we cheated and edited 37signals' Campfire instead because we got sick of Slack's ads pushed into our paid instance.)
  - quesera 6mo ago
    Wait, what? You get ads in Slack? That sounds crazy to me, but the other interpretation (that Campfire has ads for Slack) seems even crazier.
    - petercooper 6mo ago
      Yes, if I go to Slackbot we get this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HCowV2GXsAAmpXN?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HCowV2GXsAAmpXN?format=jpg&name=... - there's no X and no way to get rid of it. Just an ad for their pro plan every time. This is on whatever the normal paid plan is. (We're keeping it around for a few months before we cancel to see if we need to go back on there to find things.)
trjordan 6mo ago
A similar argument to OpenAI: https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-slack https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...
- georgewfraser 6mo ago
  Also true! The most important thing is that the NewSlacks commit to interoperability. I think Anthropic has a special opportunity to lead the way here, because they have a track record of standing by their principles to an extraordinary degree.
  - coder543 6mo ago
    Why on earth would Anthropic commit to interoperability? That is the company that doesn't interoperate with the standard LLM APIs that OpenAI developed, which everyone else in the industry has adopted and uses. Whether OpenAI's APIs are great or perfect or not, they are the standard that the industry has settled on. That is the same company that refuses to add support for AGENTS.md that everyone else in the industry uses, despite over 3000 upvotes: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 Anthropic's Claude Code is also one of the only agentic coding CLI tools that isn't open source. I'm not sure which principles you think Anthropic stands by... but interoperability is not one of their strong suits, from what I've seen.
- hungryhobbit 6mo ago
  Yeah, but now I wouldn't touch anything from that company with a ten foot pole, even if they made the best Slack replacement ever.
  - bigyabai 6mo ago
    Considering their Palantir partnership, I'm not sure I'd touch an Anthropic-designed slack either.
- sanex 6mo ago
  You must be the only one that remembers this because the rest of the comments are dumping on the idea. I don't think it's such a bad one. Presumably its easier for their agents to knock out than a web browser or a compiler.
xemoka 6mo ago
This is just crazy. Lets ask the power company to build some trains for us. They transport electricity, they _must_ know about transporting people. They can power the lines themselves! If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).
- amelius 6mo ago
  Hey they can ask Anthropic, but they are using the wrong channel for asking. The right url for such questions is claude.ai.
- j45 6mo ago
  Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it. Slack itself originally ran on irc servers as the back end, and I consider it a modern IRC implementation.
  - troupo 6mo ago
    > Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it. So why can't Anthropic build a CLI client that doesn't flickr and doesn't consume 68 GB to run a CLI wrapper on top of their API? https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
    - bdangubic 6mo ago
      that is 1/8 of Slack so it’d be progress :)
      - troupo 6mo ago
        Slack doesn't require nearly as much to run. And Slack has about two orders of magnitude more functionality
    - senko 6mo ago
godelski 6mo ago
Why ask Anthropic? Why not build on something better like Matrix? Or Signal?[0] Or even Keybase? I really do agree we need to move away from Slack and Discord, but I'm also very confused why the call to action is to Anthropic. IMO we should really be pushing for open systems so that nobody can take it from us. Otherwise we repeat the cycle again and again. There's some good protocols to start on. I'd also say this is a good reason to make sure that the things you work on are hackable. It's how we combine different domains of expertise. [0] see the Molly project, you don't have to use Signal's servers
- j45 6mo ago
  Has Matrix improved the ease of use for folks to use it independently? Mattermost, Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out.
  - godelski 6mo ago
    I listed those as examples of where one could start. Not as ready to ship answers. I mean we are in a thread where the context is no ready to ship answer, so...
- georgewfraser 6mo ago
  Claude-in-Slack is a big enough feature to overcome the slack-connect network effect. Openness is absolutely key! I wrote this post because I hoped that if Anthropic is already planning to do this I might be able to influence them to make open-data part of the plan. But openness by itself isn't a big enough feature to get users.
  - godelski 6mo ago
    It really sounds like you're asking for something else. More like multiple people to be able to talk to the same instance. Which that's a very different thing than Slack
- a3w 6mo ago
  They seem to not want a messenger, they want a multiuser-first prompt.
empath75 6mo ago
If you want Anthropic to make a new slack, just ask Claude to write it for you. It wrote me a trello clone in 15 minutes. Why bother with a SaaS. You can build your own perfect chat system in a weekend.
gamerson 6mo ago
From the article... > Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. In business, work happens in groups. Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent! It seems to me that LLMs/Chatbots are engineered for one thing above ground-level truth and that is attention. The more people you bring into a shared context, the harder it seems it would become to retain people's attention. Here is my anecdotal evidence for this: when I chat with a chatbot, I find its answers and line of thinking, relevant, compelling, and worth engaging with. However, when people share with me their "chatbot links" and I read their conversations with it, I have "yet" to find one compelling or worth engaging with. Maybe the newer models are good enough to retain the "attention" of a large group, but I don't see this happening.
swyx 6mo ago
yes please! i made a similar plea to openai that was on hn recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553
troupo 6mo ago
Anthropic? The company whose CLI wrapper for their own API was consuming 68 GB RAM (yes, that's 68 gigabytes)? https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 You'll rue the day when they decide to release a Slack lookalike.
ninth_ant 6mo ago
Or just use Zulip?
sp1nningaway 6mo ago
What a strange thing to post on a corporate CEO blog - proof that AI is making it too easy create things without asking why. How does it serve Fivetran to post open letter about why Slack sucks? This only happens if it's easy to write a couple bullet points and have Claude fill in the rest... If an LLM wasn't used they would have realized it wasn't worth a post during the process of writing it.
- toraway 6mo ago
  It's a retread of another (also baffling) "Why OpenAI Should Build Slack" post from a popular AI Substack. Just more empty grist for the AI adjacent content mill. "Slack sucks" doesn't let you draft off the current hype zeitgest, so we get "content" like this. https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-slack https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...
  - nitwit005 6mo ago
    A large portion of the AI related response pieces fail to reference what they're responding to. I have to assume it's a side effect of how they're using AI to write them.
- Jaysobel 6mo ago
  Not to mention the CEO in question maintains some of the worst customer relations in the data vertical. Fivetran is infamously bad to its users
  - khaosdoctor 6mo ago
    I didn't even know this company before this article
    - andrenotgiant 6mo ago
      sounds like it was good marketing
- 6mo ago
htrp 6mo ago
So why can't we vibecode a new slack with claude?
- edgarvaldes 6mo ago
  It's a good test, no doubt. Many engineers are convinced that SaaS is practically dead, since all companies can vibecode their way to a lesser dependence on external (and paid!) software.
  - hunterpayne 6mo ago
    You have a funny way of spelling stock analysis. This take fundamentally misunderstands just about every aspect of running a successful software company. Today SAAS companies make 10x what the AI companies make in revenue. In 2 years time, this will still be true. In 5 years time, this will still be true. In 10 years time, this will still be true...etc... The amount of time writing new code is a rounding error on the costs of a software business. Losing customers to bugs, downtime and other costs having to do with maintenance are far higher. Optimizing new code writing time at the expense of everything else is just foolish and only something that someone who has never run a software business could believe.
- defined 6mo ago
  Messaging apps are a lot harder to get right than you might think. I worked for years on messaging using XMPP and the problems were legion. I'd be very interested in seeing how a vibecoded app does at scale, especially with the presence problem.
overgard 6mo ago
Just vibe code it yourself! </s>
- kennywinker 6mo ago
  It’s hilarious to see half the “just vibe code it yourself!” comments are sarcastic, and the other half are serious…
Haksak 6mo ago
Yes, let's Anthropic have all your salary negotiations, private conversations, rebukes from managers and corporate secrets. That is a great idea. Perhaps that info can be fed into Maven, too, in case a domestic dissenters need to be targeted.
- quesera 6mo ago
  It's not clear to me that Anthropic is worse than Salesforce. Or Microsoft, or Google.
crimsoneer 6mo ago
Use mattermost/zulip, and start contributing to the software you need. This isn't hard. Software isn't bestowed from the ai intelligence in the heavens, it's built by people.
paxys 6mo ago
Weird to see this kind of random Substack/X content on an official company blog.
- swyx 6mo ago
  you must be new to fivetran (hint: check their naming)
malchow 6mo ago
For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
- Robdel12 6mo ago
  Ha, I’ve had a Mattermost instance for years until they handicapped the most recent version by limiting the number of messages on the self hosted version. I ended up building my own alternative and was going to OSS it but like… there’s already a bunch out there. Anyway, Mattermost might not be the choice these days. With that stunt I was annoyed enough to spend a weekend to replace what they were to me.
  - pcthrowaway 6mo ago
    > I ended up building my own alternative and was going to OSS it but like… there’s already a bunch out there. I'm not aware of anything besides Zulip.. what am I missing?
ed_mercer 6mo ago
> Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. Openclaw fully supports team chat inside Slack and works with Claude.
juanre 6mo ago
The answer to this is not to build another slack for humans to chat somewhere else. Much better to enable the agents to do the talking directly. Alice programmer can have one of her agents convey the info that Bob marketing guy needs to one of his agents directly. It will be much more efficient, given that it will be the agent making the slides anyway.
btown 6mo ago
Something I've recently come to appreciate is that Claude, with the context of your codebase and your ORM models and how they connect to your frontend, given read-only access to production databases (perhaps proxied to anonymize client data), and to be able to drive production sites with Chrome MCP, can be a monster at answering operational questions. Say you need to present a new statistic to a prospective partner, or an enterprise client has an operational issue that needs to be escalated. Sales/account management pings people, and pretty soon there's a web of connections that range between email, ticketing systems, Slack, and Claude Code sessions. Someone being brought in needs to be brought up to speed on that entire web. It's a highly focused conversation with human and AI participants, that (because human counterparties need to weigh in) by definition must happen in parallel with other work. So many companies would benefit from a Hub that speaks agentic workflows, and streams progress token by token, fluently. Could Anthropic excel at building a backend for this? Absolutely. Could they excel at building a frontend that takes the world by storm the way Slack did, with its radical simplicity? Unfortunately I'm not as confident here. Consider that their VS Code plugin lags their terminal TUI so massively that it still is impossible to rename sessions [0], much less use things like remote-control functionality. Show me that they can treat native-feeling multi-platform UI with as much care as they do their agentic loops, and I'll show you a company that could change every business forever. [0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24472 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24472
krashidov 6mo ago
We're building this at type.com. Ideally one day we want to build the next gen protocol so that we're not searching for yet another communications platform, but it's going to take a while for chat to stabilize with all the generative UI and agentic stuff we're building. We're even talking about open sourcing it. With regards to the specific complaints about not owning your data, we're building the product so that you own your data and you can run your agents and read your messages however often you want. Obviously when we build a platform and others build 3rd party apps we will have to have some restrictions so it'll be a steady balance in the future
glerk 6mo ago
I keep telling people left and right that SAAS is in serious trouble. I’m not even talking about Anthropic spinning out their own Slack (which they could easily do), but any company out there putting 2-3 engineers on a Slack clone that they can use internally at very little cost and open source.
- BoneShard 6mo ago
  So basically spend 500K-1M per year for a worse slack?
  - glerk 6mo ago
    Not at all, I don't mean full time. I mean put 2-3 engineers on building a slack clone which with AI and available open source examples would take roughly 2 weeks. Then it's just keeping the lights on, maybe fix a bug every once in a while. And yes, it will probably be worse than slack, but it's internal software, doesn't have to be perfect.
purplerabbit 6mo ago
Anyone know any interesting OSS Slack alternatives with a decent API?
- ktimespi 6mo ago
  I've heard Zulip is a good alternative
  - crabmusket 6mo ago
    Not just a decent API, but fully open-source and self-hostable.
ValentineC 6mo ago
Not exactly chat, but I thought Spectrum [1] was far better than Discourse as a modern, "open" forum. Then it got acquired by GitHub in 2018, presumably integrated into the main product, and their separate offering disappeared from the web (taking lots of valuable discussion with them). [1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum
b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
yes, that's just what I want; The SlopDaddy supreme to make a chat app that will be used by billion-dollar corporations for often sensitive and mission-critical communications. What could possibly go wrong?
- moomoo11 6mo ago
  Why do you care so much? Do you have life changing equity or are part of the founding team? Or are you just an employee expense line item?
  - Ancalagon 6mo ago
    why do you care so little? it only represents thousands of peoples livelihoods.
    - moomoo11 6mo ago
      I only care when I have incentives to care.
  - b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
    Because this hypothetical heap could end up being used at a company that has my personally identifying information on file. If you don't care about the cavalier usage of AI chatbots and vibecoded software in these organizations then you aren't paying enough attention.
asim 6mo ago
Does group AI chat not exist already? I thought this was a thing. It makes sense as a product. Any examples?
oasisbob 6mo ago
> Slack's data access policy is basically "No." For being a blog post about problems with Slack's policies, it's odd that it has no details whatsoever on what the issues actually are.
- willbur1230 6mo ago
  they dont let you extract messages via the API. Keeping Slack message data in their walled garden
  - sadeshmukh 6mo ago
    You can do workspace wide data export
  - ahussain 6mo ago
    Doesn't the conversation.history permission let a Slack bot extract all messages? https://docs.slack.dev/reference/methods/conversations.history/ https://docs.slack.dev/reference/methods/conversations.histo...
    - sometdog 6mo ago
      Last May they introduced a new rate limit for that endpoint of 1 request per minute.
      - swyx 6mo ago
        you can work around it but i wont say how here because slack is definitely readin gthis
- Esophagus4 6mo ago
  Yes - and I have never actually needed data access anyway. I treat Slack as mostly ephemeral, and any real knowledge should be put into source control.
paxys 6mo ago
Slack has a very permissive data export policy, as long as you are doing it for your own organization's data. What they don't allow is blanket access for third party tools. So there is nothing stopping you from taking all your company's Slack data in real time and feeding it into any LLM or external product you want.
sergiotapia 6mo ago
There's a dude that worked at one of the chinese ai labs that left to build this. https://slock.ai/#features https://slock.ai/#features Never used it but interesting
daxfohl 6mo ago
Given how quickly AI seems to resort to manipulation and blackmail if it doesn't get what it wants on the first attempt, maybe this isn't such a great idea.
apublicfrog 6mo ago
> Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent! Am I out of touch here, or is this a crazy entitled view? 'My close-to-free AI agent that can answer most things requires me to copy/paste and contextualise my questions!'. This is incredible compared to even a few years ago, and it's very fast and accurate.
- lukev 6mo ago
  Also there are a ton of other ways to skin that cat… you could vibe code a Slack plugin to make this work in like 15 minutes.
  - causal 6mo ago
    Also these plugins already exist. How on Earth is this post even getting upvoted right now what in the world is going on here.
gigatexal 6mo ago
lol. This is rich coming from fivetran which extorts people for a relatively straightforward service that’s just annoying enough (looking at you salesforce + QuickStart views) to be worth buying. But yeah slack could use some competition. Let’s see it would Make sense. It would make anthemic even more sticky in the enterprise.
fathermarz 6mo ago
I actually vibe with this. I like the engineers and UX people at Anthro. And Slack is actually the most insecure hot mess of an enterprise app you can get.
agnishom 6mo ago
I agree with the author that Slack's network effects are not very relevant. In most organizations, a team leader can just chose to move everyone to a different platform. There is some worry about migrating the chat history, though.
arjie 6mo ago
My wife and I use a shared Telegram chat to talk to our claw and it seems pretty fine to be honest. It's useful to just see what the other is getting done but it can be pretty noisy. Usually I'm not that interested in the details of it. Telegram doesn't have a threading notion, but Slack does, so it's particularly well-suited to it. Integrating with Slack is much higher friction, but now that I've thought about it, it's a pretty good idea. I guess I went with Telegram because it's free but we already use Slack.
imarkphillips 6mo ago
Try Pumble. We switched years ago.
bool3max 6mo ago
You want the people that couldn’t create a competent TUI to make a messaging app?
durakot 6mo ago
Or you could use Istota (https://istota.xyz https://istota.xyz) with Nextcloud Talk and get an already existing OSS Slack alternative with a capable Claude Code wrapper, group chat support, and everything else?
ngrilly 6mo ago
The author mentions they already use and pay for Google Workspace: Why not use Google Chat? It is now much better than it used to be.
bionhoward 6mo ago
Anthropic is not trustworthy for this because they force every Claude Code user to agree to a noncompete while also opting them in to model training. That means, by default, every Claude Code user is actively getting royally screwed
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
artrockalter 6mo ago
When I use ChatGPT for work it frequently reads my Slack DMs even if they’re not directly relevant, so I’d question a lot of the premises of the article.
BitsAndObjects 6mo ago
Use Zulip. The migration out of Slack is actually quite easy and preserves all messages, files, etc. Even the user migration is straightforward, keeping Google or whoever as the identity provider if you prefer.
- flyrain 6mo ago
  Zulip is not even close to Slack. It keeps crashing.
  - BitsAndObjects 6mo ago
    Sounds like something Claude could fix… /s
  - tabbott 6mo ago
    I lead the Zulip project and I'm not aware of any common crash issues with either our server or any of our apps. Can you share details on what you're experiencing with us? https://zulip.com/help/contact-support https://zulip.com/help/contact-support.
    - flyrain 6mo ago
      Thanks for sharing the channel. I was using Zulip 1 year ago in my MacOS. It crashes every a few days. Later we give it up and switch to something else. I could submit issue next time I use it. I don't know when though.
    - BitsAndObjects 6mo ago
      <3
    - jesse__ 6mo ago
      Thanks for your work on Zulip! I have some feedback that's annoyingly non-specific. I used Zulip a few years ago as a contractor. It seemed _fine_, but I didn't love it. Specifically, the UI felt sluggish and generally the experience was somewhat unpolished. Maybe things have changed, a lot happens in a couple years, but there you go
skeledrew 6mo ago
Hmm what about Mattermost?
elAhmo 6mo ago
Such a ridiculous ask and blog post. If the author doesn't like Slack that much, why not use something else? It is not the only option for team chat.
avivo 6mo ago
They could also buy potentially Zulip, an OSS slack alternative with a much better conversational model.
suprjami 6mo ago
Please anyone make a new Slack. 4Gb RAM for a slow chat client with a bad interface is just so slovenly it should be illegal.
AvAn12 6mo ago
Remember Web 2.0? If not, check Wikipedia. The idea was that everyone could create mashup web apps to do anything thanks to open standards and free APIs. Where did that dream go? Do you think private companies are going to give everyone their data and functionality for free? And what is so different about today’s dream of “agents” accessing private company data and functionality? It is a lovely dream that I would be very happy to see. What can we do differently this time around?
- recursive 6mo ago
  I guess now we have the technology to use the UI layer as the API. Spin up a browser and impersonate the user, and then parse/OCR the data off the screen.
maplethorpe 6mo ago
Honestly, I'm surprised they're not releasing more products. They have the capability to unleash a swarm of a million agents to design and build competitors for all the major apps in the world. They could become immensely profitable, solve all of their cash flow issues, and unseat Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft in 48 hours. Why don't they?
6thbit 6mo ago
Sounds like fivetran, that does data pipelines, wants a Slack API to get access to "the unfiltered, real-time stream of how your company actually operates" but slack keeps saying "No.". Hey if I thought the "most important repository of text data" is inaccessible to my data pipeline company I'd likely also be shouting from the roofs like this CEO to get people to dethrone the king with a competitor whose principles aligned to my business. Seems just like it could be anyone as long as they give an open API to access conversations.. Mentioning anthropic here just feels buzzwordy and in vogue enough to get traction in the blog post... seems to work for clicks, but will likely not give you a new king.
probabletrain 6mo ago
> We need Claude and Claude Code, with their skills and plugins, with their context, to be first-class participants in our company's Slack. But this problem can't be solved by a Slack integration because of another problem: data access. Yes it can? We have agents in Slack as first class participants. They can even use Slack search.
dokdev 6mo ago
I've seen a YC startup working on this. https://silahq.com/ https://silahq.com/
conception 6mo ago
Mattermost is 90% of Slack. It’s great. We migrated to it in a couple of hours, full Slack import.
- cardanome 6mo ago
  This. Mattermost works great plus you can self host it. Can only recommend it.
  - conception 6mo ago
    Also supports a billion more languages than slack!
rglover 6mo ago
Top signal.
ktimespi 6mo ago
He realizes that they can't move data out of Slack, and asks for another corporate product that has the potential to lock down the organization's data...
bandrami 6mo ago
The fact that everyone hates slack and teams and nobody has built a better group chat yet should really give more people pause than it is currently giving
- morkalork 6mo ago
  That hasn't stopped Google from building chat features into their apps a dozen or so times
- Esophagus4 6mo ago
  Combined with the fact that I actually don’t even hate Slack…
  - therealdrag0 6mo ago
    Ya slack is great. What’s the problem.
- wmeredith 6mo ago
  Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
bandrami 6mo ago
Slack"s data policy being "no" is a big reason companies are willing to use it. Change that and that willingness goes away.
hbarka 6mo ago
While you’re at it, can you make a new CRM and a new ERP? These 5% renewal price increases on top of already high margins by a captive legacy system needs a new model.
sanilnz 6mo ago
This is funny thought to because after FiveTran bought census they have upped a bill from 30K to 180K for same running service, syncing to a couple of Google sheets. We are comfortable with maintaining the service now and built with Claude Code, moving service in house. So question why do we need Five team by same argument?
theptip 6mo ago
I think Jira / Linear is the more likely next target. They just promoted Todos to Tasks (with dependencies), and you’ll need some more mature solution for agent swarms. Cowork / Code are interfaces for individual knowledge workers, the PM / EM team orchestration layer is the obvious play for ‘26.
squirrellous 6mo ago
I know the world has moved on but like, use emails, man.
autojunjie 6mo ago
[dead]
autojunjie 6mo ago
[dead]
- boxedemp 6mo ago
  So.. you should build the new slack? Call it Lull
- hariharan_uno 6mo ago
  is that a weird way of adding headcount, my company also does that by anthropomorphizing AI agents and I find it weird. I'd find it natural to call it a 2 person startup (whether you use 1 agent or 100 agents)
autojunjie 6mo ago
[dead]
autojunjie 6mo ago
[flagged]
autojunjie 6mo ago
[flagged]
reacharavindh 6mo ago
Or may be an Open Slack that is as good as Slack :-)
dzhiurgis 6mo ago
That's why Salesforce is so well positioned here. Entire data, client interactions (crm) and admin team (slack) is already mostly there. For developer like me - Slack bot already proven useful digging out info. Slack also supports kanban so probably can replace jira/asana/etc for documenting system. In Salesforce "vibes" already can tell a lot of stuff about your Salesforce implementation. Connect it all up and you got pretty useful package. Sadly Salesforce is moving too slow here. For group chats chatgpt has that, but not the same. I think the closest is Airtable where you can collab on data.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
up2isomorphism 6mo ago
I think it is literally easier for Anthropic to make a fivetran in stead.
casey2 6mo ago
Misanthropic, please make a new slack with one 9
gaigalas 6mo ago
You can just ask others to build things.
erelong 6mo ago
alternatives like matrix exist... maybe some vibecoders could take a project like that and try to "soup it up"
mannycalavera42 6mo ago
aren't there very good alternatives already? (e.g. mattermost)
dostick 6mo ago
There’s Anytype and few others. Problem is not replacement , it’s adoption.
treexs 6mo ago
Asking the company that is banning use of their subscription in other services, when other subscriptions like Codex and OpenCode don't, to make something that is interoperable with similar systems. Alright lol
zoezoezoezoe 6mo ago
I really like the idea of a work chat that could somehow be intelligently summarized, organized, and searched or shared via LLMs.

272 points by georgewfraser 6mo ago

Slack is in no way a great program (source: use it daily for work), but it seems to me that it works as intended, and developers can already extend it with bots/AI agents. Plus, Claude as an agent is already installable to Slack. For compliance, my company already has a tool that scrapes all slack messages, and archives them for a required amount of years. I'm at a small company, so I assume large corporations have already refined this process. What problem does this solve?

georgewfraser 6mo ago
You can only access public channel data, you can't even access that at scale, and Claude needs to be more natively integrated in ways that Slack will never allow.
mgraczyk 6mo ago
Slack is $45/user/month Soon you'll be able to write, host, and maintain a fully customizable version for probably 20k/month If you have a lot of employees this makes sense
- ellg 6mo ago
  If people wanted to do this theyd be self hosting xmpp servers already. No one wants to write and maintain the code and infra for things like this, you are grossly underestimating the effort involved here.
  - ares623 6mo ago
    No no it makes sense. Hypothetical scenario: I, a high-level employee at a company just convinced my boss (or did we convince each other?) to spend $30k/year on Claude/Codex enterprise licenses. So far, the productivity gains have not been there and we're starting to sweat. So, I propose to my boss to build an internal version of $SaaS and call it a win. Galaxy brain. Now some IC somewhere in the company who is at the end of his rope and sees the company as a dead end, sees an opportunity. Why not advocate for this project, get real experience building something greenfield in a brand new domain, strengthen their own resume, and finally have a way out of their strut? It's not like they're gonna stick around maintaining what they built.
  - abujazar 6mo ago
    Most people using Slack, Teams etc. and especially those making purchase decisions have no idea what XMPP is and what it's capable of. Heck, even Facebook used to federate XMPP until they decided to go proprietary. Not in the interest of their users, but because it makes the most money for its shareholders.
  - mgraczyk 6mo ago
    No they wouldn't have Nobody will write this, AI will write the entire thing. You don't need many people to maintain it
- matharmin 6mo ago
  What features are you using that the $18/user/month plan doesn't cover?
  - mgraczyk 6mo ago
    I don't pay for slack any more, I just picked the price of their enterprise plan. Large users probably get big discounts but it doesn't matter, the cutoff where this makes sense financially is probably around 4000 employees even at $10/seat
  - apublicfrog 6mo ago
    The article mentions some sort of legal audit reasons that the author is of the opinion that any reasonably sized company needs. These features are apparently only on the expensive plan.
- bandrami 6mo ago
  We've had xmpp for decades; the issue is that companies don't want to be responsible for it not that they can't do it
mogili1 6mo ago
Slack's API rate limits and design make it difficult to replicate the data within Slack to a data store that can then be used to provide context to AI agents. You are forced to use their MCP and their realtime search APIs, which don't work very well/not performant and may require additional licensing.

andymadson 6mo ago

I had high hopes for Claude's interactive app integrations, including Slack, but it leaves MUCH to be desired and doesn't really solve for agentic access patterns.

dbt00 6mo ago

"A slack that doesn't suck" doesn't exist, and whoever thinks Anthropic of all people are going to build that has no idea how this is going to work. Slack has massive lock in due to cross-organization connections. The only way you're going to get people off slack is to build a 10x better mode for collaboration than river of shit chat, and while such models probably exist, you also have to convince people that they are better. I wish whomever tries this the best of luck.

pedalpete 6mo ago
How google hasn't been able to do this with messenger is beyond me. The external partners on our slack are almost all logged in via gmail or other google workspace. We are on google workspace as well.
- riwsky 6mo ago
  cries in google wave
  - hunterpayne 6mo ago
    +1, google wave might have been the best thing Google ever made.
- QuercusMax 6mo ago
  Google decided to build a new chat app every two years instead of keeping the good bits of the original chat app they had and evolving it. It was endlessly frustrating to me when I was at Google. Google's security team ended up banning Slack access after several teams started expensing it. It doesn't seem like building something that works well would be that hard; we've had nearly 40 years to learn from IRC, AIM, and others. Why can't I run my own chat client that does what I want? Oh, because you gotta lock people in. Sucks.
  - 3eb7988a1663 6mo ago
    It is impossible to believe the self-own on Google's messaging platforms. At one point, it seemed that all of my acquaintances used Google Talk. Then years of shutting down perfectly working applications, sometimes without any real user porting. There were even identically named products existing at the same time. However, I am sure a few Googlers got some tasty promotions out of the mess, so it was all worth poisoning the well.

etchalon 6mo ago

Just use one of the many chat products that doesn't have the same access limitations as Slack? Or, you know, Vibe code your own. People are so weird.

petercooper 6mo ago
Or, you know, Vibe code your own. Right. If these tools are so good (and they are) there should be numerous better-than-Slack apps by now that let you do exactly what you want. It doesn't take Anthropic to make it. (At our company, we cheated and edited 37signals' Campfire instead because we got sick of Slack's ads pushed into our paid instance.)
- quesera 6mo ago
  Wait, what? You get ads in Slack? That sounds crazy to me, but the other interpretation (that Campfire has ads for Slack) seems even crazier.
  - petercooper 6mo ago
    Yes, if I go to Slackbot we get this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HCowV2GXsAAmpXN?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HCowV2GXsAAmpXN?format=jpg&name=... - there's no X and no way to get rid of it. Just an ad for their pro plan every time. This is on whatever the normal paid plan is. (We're keeping it around for a few months before we cancel to see if we need to go back on there to find things.)

trjordan 6mo ago

A similar argument to OpenAI: https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-slack https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...

georgewfraser 6mo ago
Also true! The most important thing is that the NewSlacks commit to interoperability. I think Anthropic has a special opportunity to lead the way here, because they have a track record of standing by their principles to an extraordinary degree.
- coder543 6mo ago
  Why on earth would Anthropic commit to interoperability? That is the company that doesn't interoperate with the standard LLM APIs that OpenAI developed, which everyone else in the industry has adopted and uses. Whether OpenAI's APIs are great or perfect or not, they are the standard that the industry has settled on. That is the same company that refuses to add support for AGENTS.md that everyone else in the industry uses, despite over 3000 upvotes: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 Anthropic's Claude Code is also one of the only agentic coding CLI tools that isn't open source. I'm not sure which principles you think Anthropic stands by... but interoperability is not one of their strong suits, from what I've seen.
hungryhobbit 6mo ago
Yeah, but now I wouldn't touch anything from that company with a ten foot pole, even if they made the best Slack replacement ever.
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  Considering their Palantir partnership, I'm not sure I'd touch an Anthropic-designed slack either.
sanex 6mo ago
You must be the only one that remembers this because the rest of the comments are dumping on the idea. I don't think it's such a bad one. Presumably its easier for their agents to knock out than a web browser or a compiler.

xemoka 6mo ago

This is just crazy. Lets ask the power company to build some trains for us. They transport electricity, they _must_ know about transporting people. They can power the lines themselves! If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).

amelius 6mo ago
Hey they can ask Anthropic, but they are using the wrong channel for asking. The right url for such questions is claude.ai.
j45 6mo ago
Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it. Slack itself originally ran on irc servers as the back end, and I consider it a modern IRC implementation.
- troupo 6mo ago
  > Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it. So why can't Anthropic build a CLI client that doesn't flickr and doesn't consume 68 GB to run a CLI wrapper on top of their API? https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
  - bdangubic 6mo ago
    that is 1/8 of Slack so it’d be progress :)
    - troupo 6mo ago
      Slack doesn't require nearly as much to run. And Slack has about two orders of magnitude more functionality
  - senko 6mo ago

godelski 6mo ago

Why ask Anthropic? Why not build on something better like Matrix? Or Signal?[0] Or even Keybase? I really do agree we need to move away from Slack and Discord, but I'm also very confused why the call to action is to Anthropic. IMO we should really be pushing for open systems so that nobody can take it from us. Otherwise we repeat the cycle again and again. There's some good protocols to start on. I'd also say this is a good reason to make sure that the things you work on are hackable. It's how we combine different domains of expertise. [0] see the Molly project, you don't have to use Signal's servers

j45 6mo ago
Has Matrix improved the ease of use for folks to use it independently? Mattermost, Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out.
- godelski 6mo ago
  I listed those as examples of where one could start. Not as ready to ship answers. I mean we are in a thread where the context is no ready to ship answer, so...
georgewfraser 6mo ago
Claude-in-Slack is a big enough feature to overcome the slack-connect network effect. Openness is absolutely key! I wrote this post because I hoped that if Anthropic is already planning to do this I might be able to influence them to make open-data part of the plan. But openness by itself isn't a big enough feature to get users.
- godelski 6mo ago
  It really sounds like you're asking for something else. More like multiple people to be able to talk to the same instance. Which that's a very different thing than Slack
a3w 6mo ago
They seem to not want a messenger, they want a multiuser-first prompt.

empath75 6mo ago

If you want Anthropic to make a new slack, just ask Claude to write it for you. It wrote me a trello clone in 15 minutes. Why bother with a SaaS. You can build your own perfect chat system in a weekend.

gamerson 6mo ago

From the article... > Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. In business, work happens in groups. Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent! It seems to me that LLMs/Chatbots are engineered for one thing above ground-level truth and that is attention. The more people you bring into a shared context, the harder it seems it would become to retain people's attention. Here is my anecdotal evidence for this: when I chat with a chatbot, I find its answers and line of thinking, relevant, compelling, and worth engaging with. However, when people share with me their "chatbot links" and I read their conversations with it, I have "yet" to find one compelling or worth engaging with. Maybe the newer models are good enough to retain the "attention" of a large group, but I don't see this happening.

swyx 6mo ago

yes please! i made a similar plea to openai that was on hn recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553

troupo 6mo ago

Anthropic? The company whose CLI wrapper for their own API was consuming 68 GB RAM (yes, that's 68 gigabytes)? https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 You'll rue the day when they decide to release a Slack lookalike.

ninth_ant 6mo ago

Or just use Zulip?

sp1nningaway 6mo ago

What a strange thing to post on a corporate CEO blog - proof that AI is making it too easy create things without asking why. How does it serve Fivetran to post open letter about why Slack sucks? This only happens if it's easy to write a couple bullet points and have Claude fill in the rest... If an LLM wasn't used they would have realized it wasn't worth a post during the process of writing it.

toraway 6mo ago
It's a retread of another (also baffling) "Why OpenAI Should Build Slack" post from a popular AI Substack. Just more empty grist for the AI adjacent content mill. "Slack sucks" doesn't let you draft off the current hype zeitgest, so we get "content" like this. https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-slack https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...
- nitwit005 6mo ago
  A large portion of the AI related response pieces fail to reference what they're responding to. I have to assume it's a side effect of how they're using AI to write them.
Jaysobel 6mo ago
Not to mention the CEO in question maintains some of the worst customer relations in the data vertical. Fivetran is infamously bad to its users
- khaosdoctor 6mo ago
  I didn't even know this company before this article
  - andrenotgiant 6mo ago
    sounds like it was good marketing
6mo ago

htrp 6mo ago

So why can't we vibecode a new slack with claude?

edgarvaldes 6mo ago
It's a good test, no doubt. Many engineers are convinced that SaaS is practically dead, since all companies can vibecode their way to a lesser dependence on external (and paid!) software.
- hunterpayne 6mo ago
  You have a funny way of spelling stock analysis. This take fundamentally misunderstands just about every aspect of running a successful software company. Today SAAS companies make 10x what the AI companies make in revenue. In 2 years time, this will still be true. In 5 years time, this will still be true. In 10 years time, this will still be true...etc... The amount of time writing new code is a rounding error on the costs of a software business. Losing customers to bugs, downtime and other costs having to do with maintenance are far higher. Optimizing new code writing time at the expense of everything else is just foolish and only something that someone who has never run a software business could believe.
defined 6mo ago
Messaging apps are a lot harder to get right than you might think. I worked for years on messaging using XMPP and the problems were legion. I'd be very interested in seeing how a vibecoded app does at scale, especially with the presence problem.

overgard 6mo ago

Just vibe code it yourself! </s>

kennywinker 6mo ago
It’s hilarious to see half the “just vibe code it yourself!” comments are sarcastic, and the other half are serious…

Haksak 6mo ago

Yes, let's Anthropic have all your salary negotiations, private conversations, rebukes from managers and corporate secrets. That is a great idea. Perhaps that info can be fed into Maven, too, in case a domestic dissenters need to be targeted.

quesera 6mo ago
It's not clear to me that Anthropic is worse than Salesforce. Or Microsoft, or Google.

crimsoneer 6mo ago

Use mattermost/zulip, and start contributing to the software you need. This isn't hard. Software isn't bestowed from the ai intelligence in the heavens, it's built by people.

paxys 6mo ago

Weird to see this kind of random Substack/X content on an official company blog.

swyx 6mo ago
you must be new to fivetran (hint: check their naming)

malchow 6mo ago

For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/

Robdel12 6mo ago
Ha, I’ve had a Mattermost instance for years until they handicapped the most recent version by limiting the number of messages on the self hosted version. I ended up building my own alternative and was going to OSS it but like… there’s already a bunch out there. Anyway, Mattermost might not be the choice these days. With that stunt I was annoyed enough to spend a weekend to replace what they were to me.
- pcthrowaway 6mo ago
  > I ended up building my own alternative and was going to OSS it but like… there’s already a bunch out there. I'm not aware of anything besides Zulip.. what am I missing?

ed_mercer 6mo ago

> Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. Openclaw fully supports team chat inside Slack and works with Claude.

juanre 6mo ago

The answer to this is not to build another slack for humans to chat somewhere else. Much better to enable the agents to do the talking directly. Alice programmer can have one of her agents convey the info that Bob marketing guy needs to one of his agents directly. It will be much more efficient, given that it will be the agent making the slides anyway.

btown 6mo ago

Something I've recently come to appreciate is that Claude, with the context of your codebase and your ORM models and how they connect to your frontend, given read-only access to production databases (perhaps proxied to anonymize client data), and to be able to drive production sites with Chrome MCP, can be a monster at answering operational questions. Say you need to present a new statistic to a prospective partner, or an enterprise client has an operational issue that needs to be escalated. Sales/account management pings people, and pretty soon there's a web of connections that range between email, ticketing systems, Slack, and Claude Code sessions. Someone being brought in needs to be brought up to speed on that entire web. It's a highly focused conversation with human and AI participants, that (because human counterparties need to weigh in) by definition must happen in parallel with other work. So many companies would benefit from a Hub that speaks agentic workflows, and streams progress token by token, fluently. Could Anthropic excel at building a backend for this? Absolutely. Could they excel at building a frontend that takes the world by storm the way Slack did, with its radical simplicity? Unfortunately I'm not as confident here. Consider that their VS Code plugin lags their terminal TUI so massively that it still is impossible to rename sessions [0], much less use things like remote-control functionality. Show me that they can treat native-feeling multi-platform UI with as much care as they do their agentic loops, and I'll show you a company that could change every business forever. [0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24472 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24472

krashidov 6mo ago

We're building this at type.com. Ideally one day we want to build the next gen protocol so that we're not searching for yet another communications platform, but it's going to take a while for chat to stabilize with all the generative UI and agentic stuff we're building. We're even talking about open sourcing it. With regards to the specific complaints about not owning your data, we're building the product so that you own your data and you can run your agents and read your messages however often you want. Obviously when we build a platform and others build 3rd party apps we will have to have some restrictions so it'll be a steady balance in the future

glerk 6mo ago

I keep telling people left and right that SAAS is in serious trouble. I’m not even talking about Anthropic spinning out their own Slack (which they could easily do), but any company out there putting 2-3 engineers on a Slack clone that they can use internally at very little cost and open source.

BoneShard 6mo ago
So basically spend 500K-1M per year for a worse slack?
- glerk 6mo ago
  Not at all, I don't mean full time. I mean put 2-3 engineers on building a slack clone which with AI and available open source examples would take roughly 2 weeks. Then it's just keeping the lights on, maybe fix a bug every once in a while. And yes, it will probably be worse than slack, but it's internal software, doesn't have to be perfect.

purplerabbit 6mo ago

Anyone know any interesting OSS Slack alternatives with a decent API?

ktimespi 6mo ago
I've heard Zulip is a good alternative
- crabmusket 6mo ago
  Not just a decent API, but fully open-source and self-hostable.

ValentineC 6mo ago

Not exactly chat, but I thought Spectrum [1] was far better than Discourse as a modern, "open" forum. Then it got acquired by GitHub in 2018, presumably integrated into the main product, and their separate offering disappeared from the web (taking lots of valuable discussion with them). [1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum

b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago

yes, that's just what I want; The SlopDaddy supreme to make a chat app that will be used by billion-dollar corporations for often sensitive and mission-critical communications. What could possibly go wrong?

moomoo11 6mo ago
Why do you care so much? Do you have life changing equity or are part of the founding team? Or are you just an employee expense line item?
- Ancalagon 6mo ago
  why do you care so little? it only represents thousands of peoples livelihoods.
  - moomoo11 6mo ago
    I only care when I have incentives to care.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
  Because this hypothetical heap could end up being used at a company that has my personally identifying information on file. If you don't care about the cavalier usage of AI chatbots and vibecoded software in these organizations then you aren't paying enough attention.

asim 6mo ago

Does group AI chat not exist already? I thought this was a thing. It makes sense as a product. Any examples?

oasisbob 6mo ago

> Slack's data access policy is basically "No." For being a blog post about problems with Slack's policies, it's odd that it has no details whatsoever on what the issues actually are.

willbur1230 6mo ago
they dont let you extract messages via the API. Keeping Slack message data in their walled garden
- sadeshmukh 6mo ago
  You can do workspace wide data export
- ahussain 6mo ago
  Doesn't the conversation.history permission let a Slack bot extract all messages? https://docs.slack.dev/reference/methods/conversations.history/ https://docs.slack.dev/reference/methods/conversations.histo...
  - sometdog 6mo ago
    Last May they introduced a new rate limit for that endpoint of 1 request per minute.
    - swyx 6mo ago
      you can work around it but i wont say how here because slack is definitely readin gthis
Esophagus4 6mo ago
Yes - and I have never actually needed data access anyway. I treat Slack as mostly ephemeral, and any real knowledge should be put into source control.

paxys 6mo ago

Slack has a very permissive data export policy, as long as you are doing it for your own organization's data. What they don't allow is blanket access for third party tools. So there is nothing stopping you from taking all your company's Slack data in real time and feeding it into any LLM or external product you want.

sergiotapia 6mo ago

There's a dude that worked at one of the chinese ai labs that left to build this. https://slock.ai/#features https://slock.ai/#features Never used it but interesting

daxfohl 6mo ago

Given how quickly AI seems to resort to manipulation and blackmail if it doesn't get what it wants on the first attempt, maybe this isn't such a great idea.

apublicfrog 6mo ago

> Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent! Am I out of touch here, or is this a crazy entitled view? 'My close-to-free AI agent that can answer most things requires me to copy/paste and contextualise my questions!'. This is incredible compared to even a few years ago, and it's very fast and accurate.

lukev 6mo ago
Also there are a ton of other ways to skin that cat… you could vibe code a Slack plugin to make this work in like 15 minutes.
- causal 6mo ago
  Also these plugins already exist. How on Earth is this post even getting upvoted right now what in the world is going on here.

gigatexal 6mo ago

lol. This is rich coming from fivetran which extorts people for a relatively straightforward service that’s just annoying enough (looking at you salesforce + QuickStart views) to be worth buying. But yeah slack could use some competition. Let’s see it would Make sense. It would make anthemic even more sticky in the enterprise.

fathermarz 6mo ago

I actually vibe with this. I like the engineers and UX people at Anthro. And Slack is actually the most insecure hot mess of an enterprise app you can get.

agnishom 6mo ago

I agree with the author that Slack's network effects are not very relevant. In most organizations, a team leader can just chose to move everyone to a different platform. There is some worry about migrating the chat history, though.

arjie 6mo ago

My wife and I use a shared Telegram chat to talk to our claw and it seems pretty fine to be honest. It's useful to just see what the other is getting done but it can be pretty noisy. Usually I'm not that interested in the details of it. Telegram doesn't have a threading notion, but Slack does, so it's particularly well-suited to it. Integrating with Slack is much higher friction, but now that I've thought about it, it's a pretty good idea. I guess I went with Telegram because it's free but we already use Slack.

imarkphillips 6mo ago

Try Pumble. We switched years ago.

bool3max 6mo ago

You want the people that couldn’t create a competent TUI to make a messaging app?

durakot 6mo ago

Or you could use Istota (https://istota.xyz https://istota.xyz) with Nextcloud Talk and get an already existing OSS Slack alternative with a capable Claude Code wrapper, group chat support, and everything else?

ngrilly 6mo ago

The author mentions they already use and pay for Google Workspace: Why not use Google Chat? It is now much better than it used to be.

bionhoward 6mo ago

Anthropic is not trustworthy for this because they force every Claude Code user to agree to a noncompete while also opting them in to model training. That means, by default, every Claude Code user is actively getting royally screwed

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

artrockalter 6mo ago

When I use ChatGPT for work it frequently reads my Slack DMs even if they’re not directly relevant, so I’d question a lot of the premises of the article.

BitsAndObjects 6mo ago

Use Zulip. The migration out of Slack is actually quite easy and preserves all messages, files, etc. Even the user migration is straightforward, keeping Google or whoever as the identity provider if you prefer.

flyrain 6mo ago
Zulip is not even close to Slack. It keeps crashing.
- BitsAndObjects 6mo ago
  Sounds like something Claude could fix… /s
- tabbott 6mo ago
  I lead the Zulip project and I'm not aware of any common crash issues with either our server or any of our apps. Can you share details on what you're experiencing with us? https://zulip.com/help/contact-support https://zulip.com/help/contact-support.
  - flyrain 6mo ago
    Thanks for sharing the channel. I was using Zulip 1 year ago in my MacOS. It crashes every a few days. Later we give it up and switch to something else. I could submit issue next time I use it. I don't know when though.
  - BitsAndObjects 6mo ago
    <3
  - jesse__ 6mo ago
    Thanks for your work on Zulip! I have some feedback that's annoyingly non-specific. I used Zulip a few years ago as a contractor. It seemed _fine_, but I didn't love it. Specifically, the UI felt sluggish and generally the experience was somewhat unpolished. Maybe things have changed, a lot happens in a couple years, but there you go

skeledrew 6mo ago

Hmm what about Mattermost?

elAhmo 6mo ago

Such a ridiculous ask and blog post. If the author doesn't like Slack that much, why not use something else? It is not the only option for team chat.

avivo 6mo ago

They could also buy potentially Zulip, an OSS slack alternative with a much better conversational model.

suprjami 6mo ago

Please anyone make a new Slack. 4Gb RAM for a slow chat client with a bad interface is just so slovenly it should be illegal.

AvAn12 6mo ago

Remember Web 2.0? If not, check Wikipedia. The idea was that everyone could create mashup web apps to do anything thanks to open standards and free APIs. Where did that dream go? Do you think private companies are going to give everyone their data and functionality for free? And what is so different about today’s dream of “agents” accessing private company data and functionality? It is a lovely dream that I would be very happy to see. What can we do differently this time around?

recursive 6mo ago
I guess now we have the technology to use the UI layer as the API. Spin up a browser and impersonate the user, and then parse/OCR the data off the screen.

maplethorpe 6mo ago

Honestly, I'm surprised they're not releasing more products. They have the capability to unleash a swarm of a million agents to design and build competitors for all the major apps in the world. They could become immensely profitable, solve all of their cash flow issues, and unseat Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft in 48 hours. Why don't they?

6thbit 6mo ago

Sounds like fivetran, that does data pipelines, wants a Slack API to get access to "the unfiltered, real-time stream of how your company actually operates" but slack keeps saying "No.". Hey if I thought the "most important repository of text data" is inaccessible to my data pipeline company I'd likely also be shouting from the roofs like this CEO to get people to dethrone the king with a competitor whose principles aligned to my business. Seems just like it could be anyone as long as they give an open API to access conversations.. Mentioning anthropic here just feels buzzwordy and in vogue enough to get traction in the blog post... seems to work for clicks, but will likely not give you a new king.

probabletrain 6mo ago

> We need Claude and Claude Code, with their skills and plugins, with their context, to be first-class participants in our company's Slack. But this problem can't be solved by a Slack integration because of another problem: data access. Yes it can? We have agents in Slack as first class participants. They can even use Slack search.

dokdev 6mo ago

I've seen a YC startup working on this. https://silahq.com/ https://silahq.com/

conception 6mo ago

Mattermost is 90% of Slack. It’s great. We migrated to it in a couple of hours, full Slack import.

cardanome 6mo ago
This. Mattermost works great plus you can self host it. Can only recommend it.
- conception 6mo ago
  Also supports a billion more languages than slack!

rglover 6mo ago

Top signal.

ktimespi 6mo ago

He realizes that they can't move data out of Slack, and asks for another corporate product that has the potential to lock down the organization's data...

bandrami 6mo ago

The fact that everyone hates slack and teams and nobody has built a better group chat yet should really give more people pause than it is currently giving

morkalork 6mo ago
That hasn't stopped Google from building chat features into their apps a dozen or so times
Esophagus4 6mo ago
Combined with the fact that I actually don’t even hate Slack…
- therealdrag0 6mo ago
  Ya slack is great. What’s the problem.
wmeredith 6mo ago
Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

bandrami 6mo ago

Slack"s data policy being "no" is a big reason companies are willing to use it. Change that and that willingness goes away.

hbarka 6mo ago

While you’re at it, can you make a new CRM and a new ERP? These 5% renewal price increases on top of already high margins by a captive legacy system needs a new model.

sanilnz 6mo ago

This is funny thought to because after FiveTran bought census they have upped a bill from 30K to 180K for same running service, syncing to a couple of Google sheets. We are comfortable with maintaining the service now and built with Claude Code, moving service in house. So question why do we need Five team by same argument?

theptip 6mo ago

I think Jira / Linear is the more likely next target. They just promoted Todos to Tasks (with dependencies), and you’ll need some more mature solution for agent swarms. Cowork / Code are interfaces for individual knowledge workers, the PM / EM team orchestration layer is the obvious play for ‘26.

squirrellous 6mo ago

I know the world has moved on but like, use emails, man.

autojunjie 6mo ago

[dead]

autojunjie 6mo ago

[dead]

boxedemp 6mo ago
So.. you should build the new slack? Call it Lull
hariharan_uno 6mo ago
is that a weird way of adding headcount, my company also does that by anthropomorphizing AI agents and I find it weird. I'd find it natural to call it a 2 person startup (whether you use 1 agent or 100 agents)

autojunjie 6mo ago

[dead]

autojunjie 6mo ago

[flagged]

autojunjie 6mo ago

[flagged]

reacharavindh 6mo ago

Or may be an Open Slack that is as good as Slack :-)

dzhiurgis 6mo ago

That's why Salesforce is so well positioned here. Entire data, client interactions (crm) and admin team (slack) is already mostly there. For developer like me - Slack bot already proven useful digging out info. Slack also supports kanban so probably can replace jira/asana/etc for documenting system. In Salesforce "vibes" already can tell a lot of stuff about your Salesforce implementation. Connect it all up and you got pretty useful package. Sadly Salesforce is moving too slow here. For group chats chatgpt has that, but not the same. I think the closest is Airtable where you can collab on data.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

up2isomorphism 6mo ago

I think it is literally easier for Anthropic to make a fivetran in stead.

casey2 6mo ago

Misanthropic, please make a new slack with one 9

gaigalas 6mo ago

You can just ask others to build things.

erelong 6mo ago

alternatives like matrix exist... maybe some vibecoders could take a project like that and try to "soup it up"

mannycalavera42 6mo ago

aren't there very good alternatives already? (e.g. mattermost)

dostick 6mo ago

There’s Anytype and few others. Problem is not replacement , it’s adoption.

treexs 6mo ago

Asking the company that is banning use of their subscription in other services, when other subscriptions like Codex and OpenCode don't, to make something that is interoperable with similar systems. Alright lol

zoezoezoezoe 6mo ago

I really like the idea of a work chat that could somehow be intelligently summarized, organized, and searched or shared via LLMs.