Comment by mikeryan52 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeryan52 | Hacker News Reader

Hi folks! I'm one of the engineers working on the Channels SDK. This is our first public release. Our emphasis has been on making agents act like natural participants in Slack and Teams, while letting them generate UI along the way. It's built on top of AG-UI, so any agent that emits AG-UI can be brought to Slack or Teams.

We've been dogfooding this internally and have seen a surge of tiny, task-specific agents enter our channels. A lunchbot agent wraps the DoorDash CLI to handle office lunch orders, a pupfood agent wraps the Pup and GitHub CLIs to do incident triage, and a chadbot generates marketing videos on demand from GitHub PRs. We've got even more that compose PostHog, Notion, Linear, and other internal tools we use.

I had previously been pretty hot about bringing agents to the web, but I'm increasingly convinced that chat interfaces are the most natural home for useful agents.

Happy to answer any questions about our approach here!

I like the idea of having a much easier way to integrate with all of the chat clients, especially with UI. I've been surprised there wasn't a way to do that more easily before (even pre AI agent revolution).

Two points of confusion that I wanted to bring up just so you know what it was like for me as a new reader: "Copilot" is unfortunately an extremely overloaded term right now. Not your fault, but I don't know about CopilotKit, so I was trying to figure out who really was behind this. (Is it Microsoft? etc) I also (like another poster) wondered if I needed your server in order to use this. I love the MIT license, but it wasn't clear to me if this was just a veneer over a closed-source thing or not. I saw in your response that there is a legit open source ability to use it, but that wasn't clear.

I saw WhatsApp listed but I can't find how the integration works?

WhatsApp is only supported on the open-source side of the SDKs right now. Full support for WhatsApp in the hosted service is on the roadmap. Point your agent at github.com/copilotkit/copilotkit, where the Channels SDKs live, and it should be able to pick it up.

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