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Comment by anonymouscaller | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

No they wouldn't have Nobody will write this, AI will write the entire thing. You don't need many people to maintain it

What features are you using that the $18/user/month plan doesn't cover?

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

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.

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

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