> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software
I imagine they smushed 2 of the most well-known AI-isms together on purpose here to troll the AI-weary. Might as well I guess, if this type of language annoys you then the whole feature probably will too.
The collective harm that this kind of language does to a human skill of writing by oneself is probably immeasurable (that is until some clever social science researcher finds a controlled way to quantifying this).
The full statement:
> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software: open, collaborative, and powered by both human ingenuity and judgement and agent scale. Teams that build this way won't just move faster. They'll build things no one else can.
I am not sure how just drawing contrasts between two things without actually drawing any kind of causal relationship to explain _why_ something is better or _how_ it does it, came to be a good thing. It is the kind of vaccuous statement that some poor tired sod with his remaining system 1 capacity just YOLOd into the blogoshpere and, like you said, the weary who don't know any better get FOMOed by. PSA: you arent missing anything.
At this point I literally have no idea what modern coding is supposed to look like. I still open my editor, type stuff in and run make. All these tools are released daily and they just fly over my caveman head.
I open my editor, I need to implement a feature, I tell chatGPT what I need, it reviews my code and provides suggestions. I then tell it to implement it. I then tell it to write tests. I review the code.
I test it. I have another AI do code review. I push it to test, then after tests to production.
For some common tasks, that I don't find interesting it is great. I do a lot of CRUD, I honestly cannot imagine writing these apps without AI.
It made curious and freed my brain to think about other things. I am now playing with hardware and plan on launching a niche product. This would not be possible if I 100% committed to programming without AI.
Remember six months ago when linkedin people were adamant you needed to keep on top of everything not to get "left behind"? Agents, skills, mcps, swarms ...
If anything, my setup has gotten ever so simpler as models got better.
I dunno dude, it's getting scary fast. You tried a fable/5.6sol maximum effort on a chunky task yet?
Maybe in a few years being a good coder will be like being a good taxi driver with self driving. You know the best spots and the ai can't drive the most unusual roads but effectively 95% of all driving is self driving.
Interesting that you use self driving as the metaphor here, when we've been told for years that self driving will be taking over the roads any day now... and yet...
Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct).
Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI?
I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is fine. Stuff still breaks, we fix it. Clients ask "How does XYZ work?" and we say, "Not sure, let us get back to you." And they're totally fine with that answer.
Everything within me screams that this is wrong and we should have intimate familiarity with the system, but I cannot find any evidence that the path of "running a team" instead of "building engineering skill" is not going to work out fine in the long-run. (Yes, my comparison between "team" and "engineering skill" is a bit rough but I'm not interested in the semantics.)
All the evidence that I'm seeing in my own business, with senior engineers meeting clients' needs with autonomous agentic teams is that it's all fine, and while there are gaps, it's actually okay. Clients are happy. Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Bugs are fixed quickly. We ship more in 3 months than we previously could've shipped in a year. I'm baffled and frankly not as advanced as my devs (I still ask questions one by one to my agent, like a Real Caveman!)
It makes me wildly uncomfortable so I'm trying to wrestle with this. I want your statement to be true, but I just don't see evidence of that.
> Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should.
Either you work in a non-standard field, or your standards for software are way too low.
What software gets to fail 80% of the time? If your ecommerce checkout software fails 1 in 5 times, you don't have an ecommerce business at all, you are dead in the water. If your airline booking software fails for 1 in 5 customers, you are out of business.
99.99% reliability still means 1 in 10000 customers are experiencing an error, which at scale can mean thousands to millions per day. That's completely unacceptable for any software I've ever been involved with writing.
I think you might be taking that number a bit too literally. What I mean is, it works enough that no one is complaining. But, all software has bugs. Some are logic/syntax bugs, and some are intent. "It should do this, but actually does that."
The sum of ALL of these classes of bugs is such that our clients haven't complained about the software being particularly faulty. It's impossible to tell if it's more or less buggy than it would've been written entirely by hand, but I suspect it's less buggy than it would be if written by hand.
Oh great, I look forward to our next Slack renewal when they foist another 125% licensing increase on us for yet another AI add-on we don't want. This year, they decided that our Enterprise plan wasn't paying for another floor on Benhioff's tower fast enough and so forced an 125% license increase. They then played the game of "if you renew early, we're going to cut you a special one-time deal because we're feeling generous and allow you to renew at a slightly discounted rate, subject to the approval of our deal desk, of course ". barf.
"I know folk's got their ways of doing things. Live where the low fruit hangs, that's how it is." - Charley Crockett
There's plenty of ideas, they just don't have them [1]. It's kind of hilarious to watch all of these people copy each other out of fear while pretending they're being original.
The amazing thing is that there is almost always an open-source alternative that is 10x better in many ways, in the case of slack https://mattermost.com/
I'm looking forward for AI to make it very easy to deploy your own tools and walk away from all this SAAS.
slack, jira, notion, even google suite
AI makes the cost of software development much lower, which means you can have a very good alternative that you can self host.
I'm thinking of companies that has 1000+ employees that pay millions annually in SaaS subscriptions.
SaaS is a tax on b2c business that will be reduced.
This is how software trends go. AI has already had several of these; it started with every site needing their own chatbot powered by AI. A decade ago, every product was trying to integrate some sort of blockchain. It takes time for them to shake out to where they actually belong.
SaaS companies never had any ideas in the first place past turning a one off software cost into a monthly one and making you an addict of their crack supply. The coding agent just puts them between you and getting shit done again so they can monetize it. Milk you dry.
Seriously just fuck the whole industry and walk away! Go back to emailing spreadsheets and documents around. Save your shit to your own hard disk. You don't need a todo app - just post-its stuck to your fucking monitor. Call someone on the fucking phone. Crack your software or use OSS. Run it all on recycled PCs. Stop giving everyone money for this shit because it's only normalising your subscription future.
Note: I work for a SaaS company. They are bastards. They all are.
Like they say this is a new way of coding, anyone can build ANYTHING and they chose to make another Claude Code and presents it like its an original invention
I'm using it with my small team and overall these types of tools are great for enabling product managers and even operations managers to help prototype, triage, etc all sorts of features/bugs/reports that previously would go directly to the engineers.
I'm going to chock this one up as a yet-another "X is your agentic coding hub" PR nonsense.
What are people actually using to manage semi-collaborative agentic coding workflows nowadays? We've moved from on-dev-machine coding to @claude in GitHub, but of course GitHub purposefully weakens the capability of that approach to the point that it's kind of a hack. Github/Linear have somewhat more cohesive experiences but it still feels like tooling for agent teaming is quite lacking and unergonomic.
Two things: (1) models are far more autonomous and run for longer coherently, (2) visibility into the development process was lost in local development.
Because models run for a long time autonomously developers need to manage more agents simultaneously. At that point you basically need a tracker for tasks in flux, and compute for each agent. It also means that the interactive monitoring isn’t as helpful anymore.
Regarding visibility, developers now think in high level architecture rather than lines of code, but implementation details are still important to document. We also want to understand when agents are hitting pain points. Both of these basically require archiving agent outputs more deeply than just code changes and commits.
I'm shocked Teams + GitHub haven't already done something like this. But I suppose that's asking a lot from Teams.
I've been using Claude and other agents in Slack for some code tasks. It's mostly fine for simpler projects and products. Things like docs or specific libraries. But I'm not really convinced this is the ideal interface yet. Reviews are my bottleneck and GitHub has a great UI for this. Plus, token consumption with Slack is out of control.
Maybe in time this will be the way we work, but for now I still find myself using GitHub, a terminal, and slack together.
Hey Slack, how about making workflows less of a pain in the neck to use? In them there is no ability to have branches rejoin to a common path. Worse, an item isn't found in a list it just throws an exception instead of giving me a null item, which oddly I can test for in an if even though it will never happen?
Sounds useful for a PM wanting to spin up a throwaway PoC. But you’d have to rip my IDE from my cold dead hands for any work that extends past the threshold of KTLO.
This is probably getting close to the right interface for these things, and that's coming from someone who is religious about using terminals, neovim, etc.
Slack wants to be primary place people do their work. And they're almost there... It's certainly where you "work" (communicate) with people, it's where many engage with and/or control other platform like project trackers, and it's increasingly the place you interact with whatever AI agents your company uses. It makes perfect send they want to bring the coding agent into the fold (into their UI) as well. And, given Anthropic's release of Claude Tag, they're probably not wrong about that.
They see the entire universe building their own version of Claude Tag and custom internal bots connected to your internal ecosystem, and realizing that they can fight for some enterprise revenue within their own product that everyone else is currently extracting
This is the easiest sell of the century, product can discuss and implement changes without ever getting engineering involved. Or at least that's the theory, I think everyone here can think of a number of reasons to have reservations on this front.
You can’t just “spin Claude up in slack”; it can’t magically just connect to GitHub and your code.
I presume this feature basically is like… if you’re already using your agents in cloud hosted runtimes, then you can connect to those agents like you already are, but via slack.
…
Did I misunderstand?
This seems like a non feature; if you’re bring to want it, you can’t have it because you have to setup Complicated External System, and if you’re already using cloud hosted agents, you’re already using it (eg. Claude tag or whatever).
So it’s what… a diff viewer in slack? An agents tab so slack becomes like cursor?
The videos seem enormously light on examples of how it actually works, did someone find a more detailed example of usage to show why you want this?
> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software
I imagine they smushed 2 of the most well-known AI-isms together on purpose here to troll the AI-weary. Might as well I guess, if this type of language annoys you then the whole feature probably will too.
The collective harm that this kind of language does to a human skill of writing by oneself is probably immeasurable (that is until some clever social science researcher finds a controlled way to quantifying this).
The full statement:
> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software: open, collaborative, and powered by both human ingenuity and judgement and agent scale. Teams that build this way won't just move faster. They'll build things no one else can.
I am not sure how just drawing contrasts between two things without actually drawing any kind of causal relationship to explain _why_ something is better or _how_ it does it, came to be a good thing. It is the kind of vaccuous statement that some poor tired sod with his remaining system 1 capacity just YOLOd into the blogoshpere and, like you said, the weary who don't know any better get FOMOed by. PSA: you arent missing anything.
Every sentence on that page reads as slop.
At this point I literally have no idea what modern coding is supposed to look like. I still open my editor, type stuff in and run make. All these tools are released daily and they just fly over my caveman head.
I used to be that person, and suddenly I haven’t opened an editor or written a line of code by hand in 6+ months.
Same here.
All I do now is spend all day on calls with people whose shit exploded and I'm trying to scrub it off the walls, ceiling and the customers.
Ah, so then you became a plumber!
Sewage worker
All money is green. Ensure you are being compensated sufficiently for your time.
Yes. No money no work.
But why? I like writing code.
Why in the world would I want to become someone that doesn't write code?
The person paying you doesn’t care about your enjoyment.
I do care about my enjoyment. Or should my existence, wants and dreams solely be defined by my current employer?
Are yours?
I open my editor, I need to implement a feature, I tell chatGPT what I need, it reviews my code and provides suggestions. I then tell it to implement it. I then tell it to write tests. I review the code.
I test it. I have another AI do code review. I push it to test, then after tests to production.
For some common tasks, that I don't find interesting it is great. I do a lot of CRUD, I honestly cannot imagine writing these apps without AI.
It made curious and freed my brain to think about other things. I am now playing with hardware and plan on launching a niche product. This would not be possible if I 100% committed to programming without AI.
I feel like theres so much churn and change there's no point in trying to keep up.
Remember six months ago when linkedin people were adamant you needed to keep on top of everything not to get "left behind"? Agents, skills, mcps, swarms ...
If anything, my setup has gotten ever so simpler as models got better.
Why go on Linkedin? The "don't get left behind" people are all in this comment section.
That’s fine, and you’re doing fine. In fact, in a few years you will probably be far more skilled than most “software engineers”.
I dunno dude, it's getting scary fast. You tried a fable/5.6sol maximum effort on a chunky task yet?
Maybe in a few years being a good coder will be like being a good taxi driver with self driving. You know the best spots and the ai can't drive the most unusual roads but effectively 95% of all driving is self driving.
Interesting that you use self driving as the metaphor here, when we've been told for years that self driving will be taking over the roads any day now... and yet...
Still waiting to see the scary products of AI. I see cool tech demos, sure. But I'm not scared just yet.
A very large percentage of systems you use every day being built with AI?
Coding has changed butbuissness has not.
Or unemployed, the jury on that is still out.
Or both?
Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct).
Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI?
I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is fine. Stuff still breaks, we fix it. Clients ask "How does XYZ work?" and we say, "Not sure, let us get back to you." And they're totally fine with that answer.
Everything within me screams that this is wrong and we should have intimate familiarity with the system, but I cannot find any evidence that the path of "running a team" instead of "building engineering skill" is not going to work out fine in the long-run. (Yes, my comparison between "team" and "engineering skill" is a bit rough but I'm not interested in the semantics.)
All the evidence that I'm seeing in my own business, with senior engineers meeting clients' needs with autonomous agentic teams is that it's all fine, and while there are gaps, it's actually okay. Clients are happy. Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Bugs are fixed quickly. We ship more in 3 months than we previously could've shipped in a year. I'm baffled and frankly not as advanced as my devs (I still ask questions one by one to my agent, like a Real Caveman!)
It makes me wildly uncomfortable so I'm trying to wrestle with this. I want your statement to be true, but I just don't see evidence of that.
> Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should.
Either you work in a non-standard field, or your standards for software are way too low.
What software gets to fail 80% of the time? If your ecommerce checkout software fails 1 in 5 times, you don't have an ecommerce business at all, you are dead in the water. If your airline booking software fails for 1 in 5 customers, you are out of business.
99.99% reliability still means 1 in 10000 customers are experiencing an error, which at scale can mean thousands to millions per day. That's completely unacceptable for any software I've ever been involved with writing.
I think you might be taking that number a bit too literally. What I mean is, it works enough that no one is complaining. But, all software has bugs. Some are logic/syntax bugs, and some are intent. "It should do this, but actually does that."
The sum of ALL of these classes of bugs is such that our clients haven't complained about the software being particularly faulty. It's impossible to tell if it's more or less buggy than it would've been written entirely by hand, but I suspect it's less buggy than it would be if written by hand.
Oh great, I look forward to our next Slack renewal when they foist another 125% licensing increase on us for yet another AI add-on we don't want. This year, they decided that our Enterprise plan wasn't paying for another floor on Benhioff's tower fast enough and so forced an 125% license increase. They then played the game of "if you renew early, we're going to cut you a special one-time deal because we're feeling generous and allow you to renew at a slightly discounted rate, subject to the approval of our deal desk, of course ". barf.
Somehow I was hopeful that this would be an announcement about adding syntax highlighted code blocks to Slack messages.
SaaS companies have run out of ideas. No one truly needs another coding agent. I weep for SaaS's future.
"I know folk's got their ways of doing things. Live where the low fruit hangs, that's how it is." - Charley Crockett
There's plenty of ideas, they just don't have them [1]. It's kind of hilarious to watch all of these people copy each other out of fear while pretending they're being original.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfHYUFeiJo
The amazing thing is that there is almost always an open-source alternative that is 10x better in many ways, in the case of slack https://mattermost.com/
I'm looking forward for AI to make it very easy to deploy your own tools and walk away from all this SAAS.
slack, jira, notion, even google suite
AI makes the cost of software development much lower, which means you can have a very good alternative that you can self host.
I'm thinking of companies that has 1000+ employees that pay millions annually in SaaS subscriptions.
SaaS is a tax on b2c business that will be reduced.
This is how software trends go. AI has already had several of these; it started with every site needing their own chatbot powered by AI. A decade ago, every product was trying to integrate some sort of blockchain. It takes time for them to shake out to where they actually belong.
SaaS companies never had any ideas in the first place past turning a one off software cost into a monthly one and making you an addict of their crack supply. The coding agent just puts them between you and getting shit done again so they can monetize it. Milk you dry.
Seriously just fuck the whole industry and walk away! Go back to emailing spreadsheets and documents around. Save your shit to your own hard disk. You don't need a todo app - just post-its stuck to your fucking monitor. Call someone on the fucking phone. Crack your software or use OSS. Run it all on recycled PCs. Stop giving everyone money for this shit because it's only normalising your subscription future.
Note: I work for a SaaS company. They are bastards. They all are.
Like they say this is a new way of coding, anyone can build ANYTHING and they chose to make another Claude Code and presents it like its an original invention
I've been working on an open source project along these lines: https://github.com/chadrem/condotto
I'm using it with my small team and overall these types of tools are great for enabling product managers and even operations managers to help prototype, triage, etc all sorts of features/bugs/reports that previously would go directly to the engineers.
Given that like omnigent and qm already integrate with Slack, it's not a huge surprise that Slack is building agent capabilities directly in.
Personally, I'm getting ecosystem fatigue. Who even has the time to set up pilots to feature-test all these different systems?
I'm going to chock this one up as a yet-another "X is your agentic coding hub" PR nonsense.
What are people actually using to manage semi-collaborative agentic coding workflows nowadays? We've moved from on-dev-machine coding to @claude in GitHub, but of course GitHub purposefully weakens the capability of that approach to the point that it's kind of a hack. Github/Linear have somewhat more cohesive experiences but it still feels like tooling for agent teaming is quite lacking and unergonomic.
Why did you move from on-dev-machine coding to @claude in GitHub if it's a weaker capability?
Im not convinced of any of these cloud or tagging solutions where I get to the point of moving coding away from my dev's machines.
Two things: (1) models are far more autonomous and run for longer coherently, (2) visibility into the development process was lost in local development.
Because models run for a long time autonomously developers need to manage more agents simultaneously. At that point you basically need a tracker for tasks in flux, and compute for each agent. It also means that the interactive monitoring isn’t as helpful anymore.
Regarding visibility, developers now think in high level architecture rather than lines of code, but implementation details are still important to document. We also want to understand when agents are hitting pain points. Both of these basically require archiving agent outputs more deeply than just code changes and commits.
I'm shocked Teams + GitHub haven't already done something like this. But I suppose that's asking a lot from Teams.
I've been using Claude and other agents in Slack for some code tasks. It's mostly fine for simpler projects and products. Things like docs or specific libraries. But I'm not really convinced this is the ideal interface yet. Reviews are my bottleneck and GitHub has a great UI for this. Plus, token consumption with Slack is out of control.
Maybe in time this will be the way we work, but for now I still find myself using GitHub, a terminal, and slack together.
GitHub has bigger problems at hand. The uptime won’t plummet by itself!
God Teams + Github would be a hell within a hell
Is this basically trying to do something similar to Zed's https://delta.dev/, but from Slack instead of an IDE?
I'd chime in, but I haven't been deemed important enough to get access to delta yet.
Looks like a great way to replicate the setup of "four guys standing around watching one guy do the work" but the one guy is Claude now.
Someone please wake me up from this fever dream
Lean into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY
Hey Slack, how about making workflows less of a pain in the neck to use? In them there is no ability to have branches rejoin to a common path. Worse, an item isn't found in a list it just throws an exception instead of giving me a null item, which oddly I can test for in an if even though it will never happen?
Sounds useful for a PM wanting to spin up a throwaway PoC. But you’d have to rip my IDE from my cold dead hands for any work that extends past the threshold of KTLO.
This is probably getting close to the right interface for these things, and that's coming from someone who is religious about using terminals, neovim, etc.
The title got me thinking Slack had open source its code
But why, it brings literally nothing to the table
Slack wants to be primary place people do their work. And they're almost there... It's certainly where you "work" (communicate) with people, it's where many engage with and/or control other platform like project trackers, and it's increasingly the place you interact with whatever AI agents your company uses. It makes perfect send they want to bring the coding agent into the fold (into their UI) as well. And, given Anthropic's release of Claude Tag, they're probably not wrong about that.
They see the entire universe building their own version of Claude Tag and custom internal bots connected to your internal ecosystem, and realizing that they can fight for some enterprise revenue within their own product that everyone else is currently extracting
This is the easiest sell of the century, product can discuss and implement changes without ever getting engineering involved. Or at least that's the theory, I think everyone here can think of a number of reasons to have reservations on this front.
Every time I'm reminded that Slack is part of Salesforce, I become nostalgic for the good old days
Slack is fine, but the moment they start bringing that stuff into Jira...
It's already here! https://www.atlassian.com/software/rovo-dev
I like rovo -.-
When we can code in English, now we can code in group chats.
Maybe it’s the future. Where I can join to coding/spec driven channels to observe or help.
I would do this - coding/spec driven in public. Hope it will be the future.
It would allow also non devs to join.
Coding in slack was not on my bingo card.
A new way to make Slack more annoying
I feel at this point all new AI announcements can be auto generated by AI.
Next up - Slack releases a model router. Cloudflare builds an agents platform. OpenAI acquires a dev tools startup.
What even is this feature?
You can’t just “spin Claude up in slack”; it can’t magically just connect to GitHub and your code.
I presume this feature basically is like… if you’re already using your agents in cloud hosted runtimes, then you can connect to those agents like you already are, but via slack.
…
Did I misunderstand?
This seems like a non feature; if you’re bring to want it, you can’t have it because you have to setup Complicated External System, and if you’re already using cloud hosted agents, you’re already using it (eg. Claude tag or whatever).
So it’s what… a diff viewer in slack? An agents tab so slack becomes like cursor?
The videos seem enormously light on examples of how it actually works, did someone find a more detailed example of usage to show why you want this?
wish i could use slack again, stuck with teams and the code sharing experience is meh
Oh look it's a Buzz clone
https://buzz.xyz/