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Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents (github.com)

99 points by nwparker ↗ HN
Our team lives in Slack, but we don’t have access to the Slack MCP and couldn’t find anything out there that worked for us, so we coded our own agent-slack CLI

  * Can paste in Slack URLs
  * Token efficient
  * Zero-config (auto auth if you use Slack Desktop)
Auto downloads files/snippets. Also can read Slack canvases as markdown!

MIT License

28 comments

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BlueOrigin50
Oh nice. I just installed and it works pretty well. It wasn't able to find the user names on the thread though.
slopusila
how about support for "auth import-token" so you dont need to keep SLACK_TOKEN in env
Hansenq
Oh this is smart! Reading where Slack stores the local data in your filesystem instead of using their API/MCP (which they charge for).

Very clever; similar to OpenAI launching Atlas when websites start blocking bot requests--just build your own browser so your bot becomes an actual user.

user3939382
I built this exact solution months ago, digging up Slack’s local storage but it failed because they had encryption on the db and the keys weren’t my account keys. Curious to see how they did it
Wuzzy
I believe in an MCP-less future of agent-service interactions and have recently submitted this general alternative (which also supports Slack) based on curl: https://github.com/imbue-ai/latchkey

With that said, a specialized tool like this will almost certainly work better if Slack is the only service you want your agents to interact with. I like that the auth is transparent.

tacone
I am asking my agents to use HTTPie this day, it's more understandable for them in case of error.
barrenko
Care to write more about this?
Wuzzy
I think that a curl wrapper could serve as a universal integration with arbitrary services (as long as they have a public API), saving you a lot of setup complexity and context space. Authentication is the hard part; ideally, you shouldn't even need an OAuth intermediary. Which I think is doable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876636. It's still a bit of an experiment, though.
apimade
Warning: in Enterprise (Grid) your account will likely be flagged as hijacked, and all of your sessions will be killed.

Slack implemented session hijacking detection a while ago, and using LLM’s without throttling will very likely result in alerts. If you’re on Enterprise; I’d suggest re-slopping a re-implementation of this with ghost Chrome puppeteer.

mogili1
I ended up vibe coding a script that uses slack token from the browser to download my messages locally. It's not been flagged yet. But my account got flagged when I tried slackdump.
nwparker
I don't use Slack Grid, but if you open an issue I'm more than happy to work with you on it!
impulser_
I'm glad more people are catching onto lightweight CLI tools and using skills to give llms more tools. It's way better than MCP. I been doing this for awhile now and it's just the best way to gets LLMs to do things with APIs built for humans.
humanperhaps
From my perspective, this also marks the shift towards agent skills instead of MCP, since agent skills rely on CLI tools. To me, this is also better than MCP since third-party developers can easily reuse existing APIs and libraries instead of needing official MCP support.
andreagrandi
same! I personally released a couple of CLIs (written using Claude Code) which I regularly use for my work: logbasset (to access Scalyr logs) and sentire (to access Sentry issues). I never use them manually, I wrote them to be used well by LLMs. I think they are lighter compared to an MCP.
FranklinJabar
Using slack makes me so depressed. The interactions we have today pale in comparison to what we had in IRC 30 years ago.

Of course I accept we're stuck with slack. I just have no clue what to write with such a limited interface. The above posted link is a great example of making the most of a tiny interface and coming up short compared to... 30 years ago

stavros
There are some great alternatives, like Zulip and Twist. Unfortunately, ~nobody uses them.
nwparker
Slack Connect just has a network effect, TBH. It's hard to move away.
iso1631
90% of people on IRC in the 90s used mIRC or BitchX. What features are missing in the modern slack client?
FranklinJabar
Well for one, you had control of the client. Writing extensions, bots, useful scripts was trivial. Slack is rotted enterprise and webhook laden mess in comparison
theanonymousone
Haha. Nobody ever cared that some humans preferred to use services via a CLI versus GUI. But now that "AI" needs it, CLI programs and APIs get released left and right :D
swyx
> we don’t have access to the Slack MCP

ok, why?

swyx
what about a way to read channels rather than messages? seems missing?

also... any shortcut for UNREAD messages? for yknow making a recap

nwparker
There's a few open issues/PRs that I'm working on getting in! Feel free to drop any request there (it's the best way for me to track it).

For UNREAD messages... Sadly, I'm not sure that Slack has an official API for that. There may be an "unofficial" API there that we could discover, but I'm hesitant for adding support there. With that being said, it's not that I wouldn't entertain the idea (it would be REALLY useful) but it would require a bit more thought.

mprsai
Are you primarily using this for answering Slack threads and simplifying understanding of large threads? In addition to this, what else could it be used for? Trying to understand what all possibilities are unlocked with this