a few friends and i have been sporadically building a slackbot (primarily as a humor thing rn) called sous-chef (
https://github.com/hackNY-labs-2018/sous-chef), with the objective of making it eventually programmable without code.
right now, that means pretty basic stuff:
- you can teach it to respond/react to certain triggers
"@sous-chef if i say xyz you say abc"
- you can teach it to fetch data via GET from any API endpoint you specify, so like
"@sous-chef if i ask what's the price of BTC you get https://api.coinbase.com/v2/exchange-rates?currency=BTC more specifically data.rates.USD"
obviously pretty limited functionality, but i think as we expand its fetching abilities -- more than just GET, maybe not limited to JSON, maybe uses some API/library to summarize content, maybe reads in query parameters from your command, etc -- it could open up all kinds of possible functionality depending on how creative the bot's (not necessarily technical) users are :)
i guess to elaborate on the broadest/most optimistic possiblity for it, i think if we made it intuitive/natural-language-driven to teach it valuable tasks that can be programmatically represented (essentially programming it but with natural language) i think it could be a novel thing.
or it might just remain a joke bot for our group :)