8 ms·

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 pow

by 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
    That's still light years better than Slack. The thing lags a few seconds while typing a message on a 20 core 128g ram machine. That's with their desktop (electron) app. Mercifully, the web app works better. Still, CC blows it out of water. Slack is that bad.
    - theshackleford 6mo ago
      your instance does that. Mine does no such thing and I don’t know anyone for whom it does. Not to say it doesn’t, but it’s clearly not a universal issue.
    - quesera 6mo ago
      Something important must be different about our Slack environments. Maybe it's the number of users, or possibly the OS? We're a small company (about 150 Slack users), and I've run the Slack (Electron) app on a 16GB M2 (macOS) and a 4GB Chromebook (running a non-ChromeOS Linux), and it has never had any noteworthy performance issues. It still sucks, but not because of performance.
    - troupo 6mo ago
      How is it "light years better than Slack"? It's a terminal wrapper for Anthropic API. It somehow baloons to 68 gigabytes when all it needs to do is call an APi and slowly draw a few hundred characters on screen. And they can't even do that without flickering. Oh yes, and until very recently it would also consume a significant percentage of CPU just waiting for input to a slash command. Yes, on that same 20 core 128g RAM machine. You surely must be kidding. Slack is an amazing cutting edge high performance tech in comparison as it has about two orders of magnitude more features that a TUI API wrapper.
  - brookst 6mo ago
    Can’t != not prioritizing
    - troupo 6mo ago
      No. They literally can't. E.g. they claim it's a difficult task to render a few hundred characters on screen, and that their CLI wrapper is a tiny game engine: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427 https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427 They literally had to buy bun to have someone who understands how things work to fix this
  - paradox460 6mo ago
    They are using react for that Not even joking
- bensyverson 6mo ago
  Yeah, I have so much less patience for "this should exist" posts. In 2026, you could argue that this blog post should have come with a link to the repo.
  - monsieurbanana 6mo ago
    I don't want everybody with an idea making a repo. It's already hard enough to filter out the slop in github that I'm reluctant about using anything built in the past year.
    - bensyverson 6mo ago
      I hear you, but it's not like the quality bar on Github was super high before AI
      - j45 6mo ago
        Underrated comment. Even if AI with autonomous agentic development made something that worked at the average of code quality, I wonder if the code might be a little more sturdy, predictable, and the compromise is a little more verbose for the level that works for the AI to manage it. Humans would then help oversee the input, insight, and extension and improvement above and below that. AI could be a baseline.
      - monsieurbanana 6mo ago
        It might not have been. But it's not hard to see that whatever productivity coefficient multiplier llms brings, it's being dwarfed by how much easier it is to publish projects that only look good on the surface. While it's a great tool in the hands of capable and well intentioned people, there's not a world out there where the average quality of software goes up.
johnfn 6mo ago
Is it really so different than asking the search company back in '01 to make a mail client, a browser, a maps app, ...?
- furyofantares 6mo ago
  Was anyone asking them to do that? Many people now think they should be broken up.
- rdtsc 6mo ago
  I didn’t ask them. Did you?
  - johnfn 6mo ago
    I think everyone at the time was hoping that Google was going to take on their pet project; my friends and I certainly were. But I don't think that has to do with my comment, which is around a more metaphorical use of the word 'ask'.
- xemoka 6mo ago
  They didn't, no one asked google to do it. It was Paul Buchheit's 20% project. Google saw a good thing, solved by someone who knew what they were doing and where they wanted it to go, and fostered it. Hell, it is what built AdWords and ultimately made google the advertising behemoth it is today. I don't think this is the same thing... I see what you are saying though, a business can expand beyond it's initial constraints, but I'm not sure that chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.
  - johnfn 6mo ago
    Why does it seem like everyone is having trouble grasping an analogy? GP was saying that as it doesn't make sense for a power company to solve trains (because it is out of their area of expertise) it doesn't make sense for Anthropic to solve Slack (because it is out of their area of expertise). My response is that a surprising number of things can fall in the area of expertise of a technology company, and this has been proven by Google in the past. Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.
echelon 6mo ago
No. This is a CEO expressing righteous indignation about a company that provides (seemingly) little value and has almost no competition. Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. And Slack costs way too much. If there were any competitors, the price would drop significantly. It's not like chat is a hard problem. And Slack's app is an absolute bear.
- troupo 6mo ago
  > Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. Ah yes. It's shameful that Slack won't open data moat to AI. You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this
  - echelon 6mo ago
    > You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information. There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born. Breathing in the air molecules that come from other people's bodies. Looking at ugly things. Hearing annoying sounds. It'll be okay.
    - troupo 6mo ago
      > I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information. It does. And a lot of this information is highly sensitive. Imagine my company's surprise if Slack would not be shameful and would just open up its data moat to AI. > There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born. Demagoguery and non sequiturs are not arguments. But I guess that's what passes for "arguments" for AI maximalists.
      - echelon 6mo ago
        By focusing on AI, you missed the point. Slack is monopolizing data access and not giving companies access to their own data. Companies want to hook up their chat BI to LLMs so it can be instantly and richly queried. Slack search sucks, and an LLM could increase employee efficiency by an order of magnitude. It could also make a lot of requests self serve rather than having employees interrupting each other constantly. Slack is prohibiting companies from surfacing their own data to AI. They're perhaps worried this will erode their leverage. That's the entire point here. Companies should have the option to leverage their chat data for AI rather than having no option at all. Slack bad.
uxp100 6mo ago
That’s a funny analogy because some electric railway companies owned power generation. The one in my town also sold electricity to consumers for some time, though most of the history I can find online focuses on the rail aspect, which makes sense, as they started and ended in the rail business, but at some point in the 1890s to 1930s appended “and light” to their name.
- xemoka 6mo ago
  It is funny isn't it? I believe it was the opposite direction mostly though, as you say, "railway... and light"; to solve their own problems of powering their infrastructure to move people, they got into power generation at a time when there weren't as many players doing what they needed to run their primary business. I'm not sure that power generation getting into trains would be as effective. Nor do I think an LLM/AI company getting into chat and discussions would be valuable. It feels wrong. But hey, "happy" to move on to yet another chat program in my life if it's better than what we got...
just-the-wrk 6mo ago
I think this person is asking the most effective entity they can find. Anthropic's offerings are better than the competition. CC and MCP came out of of their labs, and everybody scrambled to copy or adopt them. Their models consistently work better than the competition. Whenever a feature seems inevitable, they release a subtly polished version. For years I struggled to answer "what company is Apple's equivalent in software?" and I think it might be Anthropic.
cush 6mo ago
The title is the issue. They're just asking for group chats with Claude
- fragmede 6mo ago
  And other people as well, at which point they have basically recreated slack.
  - cush 6mo ago
    Slack is more than group chats
    - mietek 6mo ago
      Unfortunately.
- jinushaun 6mo ago
  But group chat is chat. Even the chat interface with Claude is chat. You can also say the same for any sort of commenting system. Posts and comments, tweets and comments, etc. I’ve built such system many times. They’re basically all the same, especially if you introduce real time updates. Channels and threads are just organization strategies.
- sathish316 6mo ago
  It might be extremely expensive to build Claude into every group chat. A better option is to have Claude as an assistant or bot in every group chat and triggered when needed. That is just a different interface for Claude or Cowork chat with the group chat context. Leaving aside the implementation details, the call for action here is valid since Slack is a black hole of your enterprise data and tribal knowledge and Slack is extremely restrictive. Try using Slack MCP in Claude Chat or any AI product
1970-01-01 6mo ago
It's not crazy, but it is much too soon. Think about GE going from lightbulbs to radios to alarm clock radios.
paradox460 6mo ago
General electric did produce locomotives for decades
- ceejayoz 6mo ago
  And modern diesel trains just run a generator to power the electric motors.
- jasonmp85 6mo ago
  [dead]
- linkjuice4all 6mo ago
  GE and others also had marketing campaigns that pushed electric appliances [0]. Yes, GE did make consumer appliances but they also made many production and supply components so it was clearly in their interest to promote this new wonder to build demand and a customer base. It's almost shocking that these AI companies aren't "magicking" up open source replacements for things like Slack, even as just a proof-of-concept. And if not the providers directly, this seems like an easy win for agencies/organizations that build crap to show off "how good they are at AI". Lastly, where's the one-person start up that's putting Slack, JIRA, and Photoshop out of business? I believe in the value of these tools but there's clearly more progress required before we can type in "replace slack and generate me a million dollars, make no mistakes". [0] https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medallion-electric-home-campaign https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medall...
  - Ekaros 6mo ago
    Why sell the output single time. When you can sell the tool that makes output to nearly unlimited times. Competing with your own customers is bad move as it limits number of those hopeful fools.
ninjha 6mo ago
> matrix would be everywhere now i know the bar is 1000 feet below the earth with teams but matrix is still only maybe a foot or two above the surface i really want to like it but every few months i try it and it’s clearly just not ready :(
debo_ 6mo ago
Wasn't Slack a gaming company that accidentally became a chat company?
- aaronbrethorst 6mo ago
  just like Flickr was a game that accidentally became a photo sharing website. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/633164558/slack-flickr-stewart-butterfield https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/633164558/slack-flickr-stewar... Stewart Butterfield is absolutely terrible at making games, but incredibly good at building successful companies.
- mezzode 6mo ago
  You're thinking of Discord
  - debo_ 6mo ago
    No, I'm not. The company that became the Slack corporation was originally a game studio : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History
    - mezzode 6mo ago
      Oh wow, TIL that Slack also started like that
- gspetr 6mo ago
  Andreessen Horowitz was a major backer of Slack's predecessor, Tiny Speck, which was originally building a game called Glitch. When Glitch failed in 2012, founder Stewart Butterfield offered to return the remaining $6 million to investors. Ben Horowitz instead encouraged Butterfield to pivot and build out the internal communication tool the team had developed for themselves, which eventually became Slack. I saw an interview (don't have the link at hand unfortunately) where Horowitz said he didn't much care for the $6M as he had already been set at that point moneywise, and essentially wanted to gamble on an off chance Slack succeeds. Horowitz continued to support the company through its rapid growth and eventual direct public offering (DPO) in 2019.
paulsutter 6mo ago
The model companies are the new OS, you bet they are thinking about projects like this
jayd16 6mo ago
If they sell a magic app building machine, its not crazy to ask them build an app with it, is it?
- cyanydeez 6mo ago
  Can you imagine how well they'd sell their product if they could actually demonstrate it's capabilities by just, at a whim, duplicating a non-trivial software product.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- sonofhans 6mo ago
  Of course it is. Making shovels and digging holes are different skills and require different organizations.
  - gzread 6mo ago
    But this is a magic shovel that digs holes and tunnels all by itself exactly as intended. It should be able to do this without any special skill involved in prompting it.
    - _heimdall 6mo ago
      You're thinking post-scarcity. We aren't there yet, but one say well have a magic wand, magic shovel, and magic anything else that is currently scarce.
      - otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
        You sound like a low-information luddite. Have you tried this week's latest model? You're probably prompting it wrong.
        _heimdall 6mo ago
khaosdoctor 6mo ago
I mean, the idea itself (of having <insert your AI minion here> inside Slack) has crossed my mind multiple times, and I have successfully extract some data using AI from it and it's actually really useful. But I agree, having Anthropic building this is like having DJI building planes because they know how to create things that fly.
wakawaka28 6mo ago
Imagine thinking instant messaging is hard after 30+ years of it...
sathish316 6mo ago
Cowork Chat. Anthropic can do this. What is wrong with this line of thinking? Anthropic is the power company that has a 3D printer to make a faster Maglev than anyone. If Enterprise companies are restrictive to make your own data their only moat, that moat can be broken. Have you tried building any AI agent or using an AI product with Slack MCP? This is one of the hardest problems in SaaS data access and Slack tries to literally block any form of API or OAuth based access. Even Google workspace is not that restrictive and has opened up a cli for the workspace.
- troupo 6mo ago
  > Anthropic is the power company that has a 3D printer to make a faster Maglev than anyone. And yet they can't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281246
joshAg 6mo ago
It's not crazy at all. That's what conglomerates do. GE literally built trains and electricity until 2021 when the train unit got spun off.
KronisLV 6mo ago
> 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). I think all of the big tools are drowning in complexity by trying to be hugely scalable, integrate with a whole bunch of different tools and so on. What most of us need is SimpleSlack or SimpleDiscord - something you can deploy on a cheap VPS as a single instance for your community/company of 10-200 members. No complex federation, no enterprise crap, just channels, media, voice and video calls with screen sharing and search, probably an API. Single Go binary for the RESTful API and SSE, PostgreSQL and Garage/SeaweedFS for object storage, maybe an additional binary for handling calls/video cause the hardware requirements of that use case kick everyone's butt and that thin will inevitably crash. Docker containers for resource limits and management. Something a bit like phpBB back in the day, but more instant messaging, although one could imagine supporting the forum format too. Network effect be damned. Mattermost is pretty close to that, though they place a bunch of restrictions on you in regards to calls, last I checked. Stoat looks pretty cool, though, hadn't seen much of it before! Maybe Zulip for the people that need something with fewer restrictions (though the mobile app push notification limitations are weird, still hate how mobile OSes handle that per-app).

by xemoka 6mo ago

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
  That's still light years better than Slack. The thing lags a few seconds while typing a message on a 20 core 128g ram machine. That's with their desktop (electron) app. Mercifully, the web app works better. Still, CC blows it out of water. Slack is that bad.
  - theshackleford 6mo ago
    your instance does that. Mine does no such thing and I don’t know anyone for whom it does. Not to say it doesn’t, but it’s clearly not a universal issue.
  - quesera 6mo ago
    Something important must be different about our Slack environments. Maybe it's the number of users, or possibly the OS? We're a small company (about 150 Slack users), and I've run the Slack (Electron) app on a 16GB M2 (macOS) and a 4GB Chromebook (running a non-ChromeOS Linux), and it has never had any noteworthy performance issues. It still sucks, but not because of performance.
  - troupo 6mo ago
    How is it "light years better than Slack"? It's a terminal wrapper for Anthropic API. It somehow baloons to 68 gigabytes when all it needs to do is call an APi and slowly draw a few hundred characters on screen. And they can't even do that without flickering. Oh yes, and until very recently it would also consume a significant percentage of CPU just waiting for input to a slash command. Yes, on that same 20 core 128g RAM machine. You surely must be kidding. Slack is an amazing cutting edge high performance tech in comparison as it has about two orders of magnitude more features that a TUI API wrapper.
- brookst 6mo ago
  Can’t != not prioritizing
  - troupo 6mo ago
    No. They literally can't. E.g. they claim it's a difficult task to render a few hundred characters on screen, and that their CLI wrapper is a tiny game engine: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427 https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427 They literally had to buy bun to have someone who understands how things work to fix this
- paradox460 6mo ago
  They are using react for that Not even joking
bensyverson 6mo ago
Yeah, I have so much less patience for "this should exist" posts. In 2026, you could argue that this blog post should have come with a link to the repo.
- monsieurbanana 6mo ago
  I don't want everybody with an idea making a repo. It's already hard enough to filter out the slop in github that I'm reluctant about using anything built in the past year.
  - bensyverson 6mo ago
    I hear you, but it's not like the quality bar on Github was super high before AI
    - j45 6mo ago
      Underrated comment. Even if AI with autonomous agentic development made something that worked at the average of code quality, I wonder if the code might be a little more sturdy, predictable, and the compromise is a little more verbose for the level that works for the AI to manage it. Humans would then help oversee the input, insight, and extension and improvement above and below that. AI could be a baseline.
    - monsieurbanana 6mo ago
      It might not have been. But it's not hard to see that whatever productivity coefficient multiplier llms brings, it's being dwarfed by how much easier it is to publish projects that only look good on the surface. While it's a great tool in the hands of capable and well intentioned people, there's not a world out there where the average quality of software goes up.

johnfn 6mo ago

Is it really so different than asking the search company back in '01 to make a mail client, a browser, a maps app, ...?

furyofantares 6mo ago
Was anyone asking them to do that? Many people now think they should be broken up.
rdtsc 6mo ago
I didn’t ask them. Did you?
- johnfn 6mo ago
  I think everyone at the time was hoping that Google was going to take on their pet project; my friends and I certainly were. But I don't think that has to do with my comment, which is around a more metaphorical use of the word 'ask'.
xemoka 6mo ago
They didn't, no one asked google to do it. It was Paul Buchheit's 20% project. Google saw a good thing, solved by someone who knew what they were doing and where they wanted it to go, and fostered it. Hell, it is what built AdWords and ultimately made google the advertising behemoth it is today. I don't think this is the same thing... I see what you are saying though, a business can expand beyond it's initial constraints, but I'm not sure that chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.
- johnfn 6mo ago
  Why does it seem like everyone is having trouble grasping an analogy? GP was saying that as it doesn't make sense for a power company to solve trains (because it is out of their area of expertise) it doesn't make sense for Anthropic to solve Slack (because it is out of their area of expertise). My response is that a surprising number of things can fall in the area of expertise of a technology company, and this has been proven by Google in the past. Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.

echelon 6mo ago

No. This is a CEO expressing righteous indignation about a company that provides (seemingly) little value and has almost no competition. Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. And Slack costs way too much. If there were any competitors, the price would drop significantly. It's not like chat is a hard problem. And Slack's app is an absolute bear.

troupo 6mo ago
> Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. Ah yes. It's shameful that Slack won't open data moat to AI. You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this
- echelon 6mo ago
  > You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information. There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born. Breathing in the air molecules that come from other people's bodies. Looking at ugly things. Hearing annoying sounds. It'll be okay.
  - troupo 6mo ago
    > I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information. It does. And a lot of this information is highly sensitive. Imagine my company's surprise if Slack would not be shameful and would just open up its data moat to AI. > There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born. Demagoguery and non sequiturs are not arguments. But I guess that's what passes for "arguments" for AI maximalists.
    - echelon 6mo ago
      By focusing on AI, you missed the point. Slack is monopolizing data access and not giving companies access to their own data. Companies want to hook up their chat BI to LLMs so it can be instantly and richly queried. Slack search sucks, and an LLM could increase employee efficiency by an order of magnitude. It could also make a lot of requests self serve rather than having employees interrupting each other constantly. Slack is prohibiting companies from surfacing their own data to AI. They're perhaps worried this will erode their leverage. That's the entire point here. Companies should have the option to leverage their chat data for AI rather than having no option at all. Slack bad.

uxp100 6mo ago

That’s a funny analogy because some electric railway companies owned power generation. The one in my town also sold electricity to consumers for some time, though most of the history I can find online focuses on the rail aspect, which makes sense, as they started and ended in the rail business, but at some point in the 1890s to 1930s appended “and light” to their name.

xemoka 6mo ago
It is funny isn't it? I believe it was the opposite direction mostly though, as you say, "railway... and light"; to solve their own problems of powering their infrastructure to move people, they got into power generation at a time when there weren't as many players doing what they needed to run their primary business. I'm not sure that power generation getting into trains would be as effective. Nor do I think an LLM/AI company getting into chat and discussions would be valuable. It feels wrong. But hey, "happy" to move on to yet another chat program in my life if it's better than what we got...

just-the-wrk 6mo ago

I think this person is asking the most effective entity they can find. Anthropic's offerings are better than the competition. CC and MCP came out of of their labs, and everybody scrambled to copy or adopt them. Their models consistently work better than the competition. Whenever a feature seems inevitable, they release a subtly polished version. For years I struggled to answer "what company is Apple's equivalent in software?" and I think it might be Anthropic.

cush 6mo ago

The title is the issue. They're just asking for group chats with Claude

fragmede 6mo ago
And other people as well, at which point they have basically recreated slack.
- cush 6mo ago
  Slack is more than group chats
  - mietek 6mo ago
    Unfortunately.
jinushaun 6mo ago
But group chat is chat. Even the chat interface with Claude is chat. You can also say the same for any sort of commenting system. Posts and comments, tweets and comments, etc. I’ve built such system many times. They’re basically all the same, especially if you introduce real time updates. Channels and threads are just organization strategies.
sathish316 6mo ago
It might be extremely expensive to build Claude into every group chat. A better option is to have Claude as an assistant or bot in every group chat and triggered when needed. That is just a different interface for Claude or Cowork chat with the group chat context. Leaving aside the implementation details, the call for action here is valid since Slack is a black hole of your enterprise data and tribal knowledge and Slack is extremely restrictive. Try using Slack MCP in Claude Chat or any AI product

1970-01-01 6mo ago

It's not crazy, but it is much too soon. Think about GE going from lightbulbs to radios to alarm clock radios.

paradox460 6mo ago

General electric did produce locomotives for decades

ceejayoz 6mo ago
And modern diesel trains just run a generator to power the electric motors.
jasonmp85 6mo ago
[dead]
linkjuice4all 6mo ago
GE and others also had marketing campaigns that pushed electric appliances [0]. Yes, GE did make consumer appliances but they also made many production and supply components so it was clearly in their interest to promote this new wonder to build demand and a customer base. It's almost shocking that these AI companies aren't "magicking" up open source replacements for things like Slack, even as just a proof-of-concept. And if not the providers directly, this seems like an easy win for agencies/organizations that build crap to show off "how good they are at AI". Lastly, where's the one-person start up that's putting Slack, JIRA, and Photoshop out of business? I believe in the value of these tools but there's clearly more progress required before we can type in "replace slack and generate me a million dollars, make no mistakes". [0] https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medallion-electric-home-campaign https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medall...
- Ekaros 6mo ago
  Why sell the output single time. When you can sell the tool that makes output to nearly unlimited times. Competing with your own customers is bad move as it limits number of those hopeful fools.

ninjha 6mo ago

> matrix would be everywhere now i know the bar is 1000 feet below the earth with teams but matrix is still only maybe a foot or two above the surface i really want to like it but every few months i try it and it’s clearly just not ready :(

debo_ 6mo ago

Wasn't Slack a gaming company that accidentally became a chat company?

aaronbrethorst 6mo ago
just like Flickr was a game that accidentally became a photo sharing website. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/633164558/slack-flickr-stewart-butterfield https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/633164558/slack-flickr-stewar... Stewart Butterfield is absolutely terrible at making games, but incredibly good at building successful companies.
mezzode 6mo ago
You're thinking of Discord
- debo_ 6mo ago
  No, I'm not. The company that became the Slack corporation was originally a game studio : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History
  - mezzode 6mo ago
    Oh wow, TIL that Slack also started like that
gspetr 6mo ago
Andreessen Horowitz was a major backer of Slack's predecessor, Tiny Speck, which was originally building a game called Glitch. When Glitch failed in 2012, founder Stewart Butterfield offered to return the remaining $6 million to investors. Ben Horowitz instead encouraged Butterfield to pivot and build out the internal communication tool the team had developed for themselves, which eventually became Slack. I saw an interview (don't have the link at hand unfortunately) where Horowitz said he didn't much care for the $6M as he had already been set at that point moneywise, and essentially wanted to gamble on an off chance Slack succeeds. Horowitz continued to support the company through its rapid growth and eventual direct public offering (DPO) in 2019.

paulsutter 6mo ago

The model companies are the new OS, you bet they are thinking about projects like this

jayd16 6mo ago

If they sell a magic app building machine, its not crazy to ask them build an app with it, is it?

cyanydeez 6mo ago
Can you imagine how well they'd sell their product if they could actually demonstrate it's capabilities by just, at a whim, duplicating a non-trivial software product.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
sonofhans 6mo ago
Of course it is. Making shovels and digging holes are different skills and require different organizations.
- gzread 6mo ago
  But this is a magic shovel that digs holes and tunnels all by itself exactly as intended. It should be able to do this without any special skill involved in prompting it.
  - _heimdall 6mo ago
    You're thinking post-scarcity. We aren't there yet, but one say well have a magic wand, magic shovel, and magic anything else that is currently scarce.
    - otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
      You sound like a low-information luddite. Have you tried this week's latest model? You're probably prompting it wrong.
      - _heimdall 6mo ago

khaosdoctor 6mo ago

I mean, the idea itself (of having <insert your AI minion here> inside Slack) has crossed my mind multiple times, and I have successfully extract some data using AI from it and it's actually really useful. But I agree, having Anthropic building this is like having DJI building planes because they know how to create things that fly.

wakawaka28 6mo ago

Imagine thinking instant messaging is hard after 30+ years of it...

sathish316 6mo ago

Cowork Chat. Anthropic can do this. What is wrong with this line of thinking? Anthropic is the power company that has a 3D printer to make a faster Maglev than anyone. If Enterprise companies are restrictive to make your own data their only moat, that moat can be broken. Have you tried building any AI agent or using an AI product with Slack MCP? This is one of the hardest problems in SaaS data access and Slack tries to literally block any form of API or OAuth based access. Even Google workspace is not that restrictive and has opened up a cli for the workspace.

troupo 6mo ago
> Anthropic is the power company that has a 3D printer to make a faster Maglev than anyone. And yet they can't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281246

joshAg 6mo ago

It's not crazy at all. That's what conglomerates do. GE literally built trains and electricity until 2021 when the train unit got spun off.

KronisLV 6mo ago

> 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). I think all of the big tools are drowning in complexity by trying to be hugely scalable, integrate with a whole bunch of different tools and so on. What most of us need is SimpleSlack or SimpleDiscord - something you can deploy on a cheap VPS as a single instance for your community/company of 10-200 members. No complex federation, no enterprise crap, just channels, media, voice and video calls with screen sharing and search, probably an API. Single Go binary for the RESTful API and SSE, PostgreSQL and Garage/SeaweedFS for object storage, maybe an additional binary for handling calls/video cause the hardware requirements of that use case kick everyone's butt and that thin will inevitably crash. Docker containers for resource limits and management. Something a bit like phpBB back in the day, but more instant messaging, although one could imagine supporting the forum format too. Network effect be damned. Mattermost is pretty close to that, though they place a bunch of restrictions on you in regards to calls, last I checked. Stoat looks pretty cool, though, hadn't seen much of it before! Maybe Zulip for the people that need something with fewer restrictions (though the mobile app push notification limitations are weird, still hate how mobile OSes handle that per-app).