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Comment by jacobgold | Hacker News Reader

Slack exists largely because IRC was insufficient. It didn't natively support channel history, search, etc.

For AI agents to flourish, Slack has to either truly open its network with a protocol or eventually be replaced.

I'd like to see Slack embrace an AT protocol-based chat system, which then apps like Buzz could implement. Then users could log in with domain handles like @yourname.com, and agents could use handles like @agent1.yourname.com, all under their complete control.

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Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?

I ask about Slack here because it's pertinent, but I've both seen and experienced firsthand this inversion across the industry where we must adapt our workflows for AI.

Isn't a tool supposed to work for you, not the other around?

> Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?

Technically, because if the world moves to AI-driven tools and Slack is not cooperating, it will no longer serve the world and will be left behind.

> Isn't a tool supposed to work for you

If you want AI integration in your chat and Slack is not helping make it happen, then Slack is not working for you.

On the other hand, constantly chasing the latest fad can be a useless drain of resources and (worse yet) attention. In this context, AI is by now most likely not a fad, but the ways to interoperate with it can be: mcp, cli, agent, tag, ... And the same goes for users, reinventing their processes and practices 5 times per year.

I think this is missing my implied point. Is this desire for AI integration actually coming from most people? Or is it a handful of decision makers who aren't thinking about the technology critically for one reason or another (either due to lack of information/understanding, or a financial stake)?

AI is still seen very negatively in opinion polls across multiple countries, and anecdotally, tools which were often obnoxious to use before AI are now much more so, at least to my flesh-and-blood self. It really seems like we're making things worse for ourselves just to help support this would-be self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just my two-cents as a very much boots-on-the-ground infrastructure engineer. We use LLMs heavily on my team -- to write code and review PRs. Our harnesses and guardrails are very very good so we get extremely high-quality output out of most models.

But getting the humans and agents to talk together is really fragmented right now. It's annoying that the agent with the context in my locally-installed Cursor can't really participate in a Slack conversation about a PR that 'it' principally authored (and which I've signed off on).

This is a real communication problem that we face every day, and eventually someone will solve it well and I will ask our leadership to give them a lot of money.

> Is this desire for AI integration actually coming from most people?

Ahhh I see. That's going to change a lot across companies, teams and individuals. My particular bubble is full of actual workers looking for ways to apply it and trying things to see what sticks, so that interpretation did not land in my head. If anything, decision makers around me are being encouraging, but cautious and throttling experiments and requests for access/connection/etc, and damn well they should because they are actually accountable for mishaps.

I'm sympathetic to this POV. I think specifically in the case of Slack, it's not their responsibility in a cosmic sense, but it is in line with the direction and general promise they've been making to customers since forever.

A major part of Slack's go-to-market strategy for as long as I can remember has been pushing Slack as more than a interface for talking with teammates, but as a unified interface for generally piloting your business. Slack has heavily pushed ideas like "SlackOps", they've had Slackbot in the product forever, and they've always prioritized and sold integrations designed to let you build your business workflows in Slack. They even updated Slackbot to go from "that chatbot you DM to set reminders" to "Your AI teammate in Slack": https://slack.com/features/slackbot

So adapting to agents is in keeping with what Slack promises its users. I know that a lot of people don't want more AI features in apps that don't need them (i fall into this camp despite working in ML myself and using LLMs all day). I just think that in the case of Slack, their most passionate power-users are also the sort of people who do really want AI features.

Notion is probably a good companion here. It is similarly a really primitive utility--text editing--that has marketed itself as a sort of central interface for running your company. I know plenty of people, especially outside of engineering, for whom Notion is essentially their browser for work. And it's probably not a coincidence that the Notion + Slack are the two normal office software companies I can think of who've most heavily adopted and marketed AI features.

It’s not Slack’s responsibility to do so, but it is their vulnerability if they don’t

You're assuming there is a bag to capture about placating to slop bots, that has yet to be determine. What it mostly seems to do now is balloon your services capacity on serving your worst customers to do busy work no one cares about.

There's many new and existing companies right now that are growing fast based on the promise of doing "x but with AI". This starts from customer support tools, coding agents, code review platforms and they are definitely "capturing a bag" there.

I'm not blind to the issues with AI, but Slack ignoring it (Apart from their enterprise AI search they are pushing) and having the bots interact on the platform right now (Basically spewing a lot of messages in threads with all their "thinking" and not a more native integration) is not going to help them.

There basically haven't been any new features on their bot / app platform for a long time now.

Slack isn't responsible for the work product of its customers. They provide a service, and like to get new customers. Those customers use agents. Which tech solution they use is debatable but they can't ignore it. They have supported bots and 3rd parties for eons anyway.

It is like asking in 1999 why DHL should have a website. Surely they can just meet people where they are - on the phone, on the high street. Why does everything need a bloody website.

We also adapted our workflows to the invention of trains, shipping containers, the PC & the internet. I fail to see why AI would be so different.

You would like Cory Doctorow's concept of reverse centaurs.

ATProto's tbd permission system is insufficient for the granularity needed in enterprise. Many of those features needed (like groups) will have to be built in an app view and by proxy be centralized. ACLs are two generations in the past of IAM history

Chat is also not a great modality for the PDS/ATP, Roomy learned this and is building a dedicated protocol and bridge.

There's a new feature being added to AT to support "permissioned data" that would handle a Slack-like use-case: https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0016-p...

I know about it, that's the one I'm referring to. That proposal is insufficient. I was deeply involved in the private data discussions, built a PDS fork / prototype on ReBAC/SpiceDB, and presented it at the first Private Data WG (which no one from Bluesky attended). Bluesky has chosen a path that suits them, not the community at large.

You can learn more about my work here: https://github.com/verdverm/atproto

the community convos here: https://discourse.atprotocol.community/tag/private-data/2

At this point, Bluesky controls the protocol, decided what they want permissioned spaces to look like, and are not entertaining any other proposals (afaict).

I expect there to be an eventual successor that puts permissions at the core of the protocol from the very start.

Just like Matrix and it's bot/puppet accounts.

I originally was passionate about Slack simply because it was "IRC but with modern quality of life improvements". Ever since they got fucked by MSFT and sold out to Salesforce, it's basically been dead in the water and the only changes have largely made it worse.

Slack already has an API for building bots. It doesn't need to be open.

More like HipChat. You are off by like 15 years

man i love IRC, and you're 100% right

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