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.
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.
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.
"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.
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).
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] threadFor 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?
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
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.
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.
People are so weird.
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).
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
> 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.
You'll rue the day when they decide to release a Slack lookalike.
Perhaps that info can be fed into Maven, too, in case a domestic dissenters need to be targeted.
Openclaw fully supports team chat inside Slack and works with Claude.
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
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