alt Hacker NewsAnthropic, please make a new Slack
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Why ask Anthropic?
Why not build on something better like Matrix? Or Signal?[0] Or even Keybase?
I really do agree we need to move away from Slack and Discord, but I'm also very confused why the call to action is to Anthropic. IMO we should really be pushing for open systems so that nobody can take it from us. Otherwise we repeat the cycle again and again. There's some good protocols to start on. I'd also say this is a good reason to make sure that the things you work on are hackable. It's how we combine different domains of expertise.
[0] see the Molly project, you don't have to use Signal's servers
What a strange thing to post on a corporate CEO blog - proof that AI is making it too easy create things without asking why. How does it serve Fivetran to post open letter about why Slack sucks? This only happens if it's easy to write a couple bullet points and have Claude fill in the rest... If an LLM wasn't used they would have realized it wasn't worth a post during the process of writing it.
"A slack that doesn't suck" doesn't exist, and whoever thinks Anthropic of all people are going to build that has no idea how this is going to work.
Slack has massive lock in due to cross-organization connections. The only way you're going to get people off slack is to build a 10x better mode for collaboration than river of shit chat, and while such models probably exist, you also have to convince people that they are better.
I wish whomever tries this the best of luck.
The fact that everyone hates slack and teams and nobody has built a better group chat yet should really give more people pause than it is currently giving
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?
Use Zulip.
The migration out of Slack is actually quite easy and preserves all messages, files, etc. Even the user migration is straightforward, keeping Google or whoever as the identity provider if you prefer.
For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/
> Slack's data access policy is basically "No."
For being a blog post about problems with Slack's policies, it's odd that it has no details whatsoever on what the issues actually are.
> Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent!
Am I out of touch here, or is this a crazy entitled view? 'My close-to-free AI agent that can answer most things requires me to copy/paste and contextualise my questions!'. This is incredible compared to even a few years ago, and it's very fast and accurate.
A similar argument to OpenAI: https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...
From the article...
> Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. In business, work happens in groups. Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent!
It seems to me that LLMs/Chatbots are engineered for one thing above ground-level truth and that is attention. The more people you bring into a shared context, the harder it seems it would become to retain people's attention.
Here is my anecdotal evidence for this: when I chat with a chatbot, I find its answers and line of thinking, relevant, compelling, and worth engaging with. However, when people share with me their "chatbot links" and I read their conversations with it, I have "yet" to find one compelling or worth engaging with. Maybe the newer models are good enough to retain the "attention" of a large group, but I don't see this happening.
Sounds like fivetran, that does data pipelines, wants a Slack API to get access to "the unfiltered, real-time stream of how your company actually operates" but slack keeps saying "No.".
Hey if I thought the "most important repository of text data" is inaccessible to my data pipeline company I'd likely also be shouting from the roofs like this CEO to get people to dethrone the king with a competitor whose principles aligned to my business.
Seems just like it could be anyone as long as they give an open API to access conversations.. Mentioning anthropic here just feels buzzwordy and in vogue enough to get traction in the blog post... seems to work for clicks, but will likely not give you a new king.
While you’re at it, can you make a new CRM and a new ERP? These 5% renewal price increases on top of already high margins by a captive legacy system needs a new model.
Please anyone make a new Slack. 4Gb RAM for a slow chat client with a bad interface is just so slovenly it should be illegal.
Slack"s data policy being "no" is a big reason companies are willing to use it. Change that and that willingness goes away.
> We need Claude and Claude Code, with their skills and plugins, with their context, to be first-class participants in our company's Slack. But this problem can't be solved by a Slack integration because of another problem: data access.
Yes it can? We have agents in Slack as first class participants. They can even use Slack search.
Mattermost is 90% of Slack. It’s great. We migrated to it in a couple of hours, full Slack import.
Weird to see this kind of random Substack/X content on an official company blog.
yes, that's just what I want; The SlopDaddy supreme to make a chat app that will be used by billion-dollar corporations for often sensitive and mission-critical communications. What could possibly go wrong?
Slack has a very permissive data export policy, as long as you are doing it for your own organization's data. What they don't allow is blanket access for third party tools.
So there is nothing stopping you from taking all your company's Slack data in real time and feeding it into any LLM or external product you want.
Remember Web 2.0? If not, check Wikipedia. The idea was that everyone could create mashup web apps to do anything thanks to open standards and free APIs. Where did that dream go? Do you think private companies are going to give everyone their data and functionality for free?
And what is so different about today’s dream of “agents” accessing private company data and functionality?
It is a lovely dream that I would be very happy to see. What can we do differently this time around?
He realizes that they can't move data out of Slack, and asks for another corporate product that has the potential to lock down the organization's data...
Anthropic is not trustworthy for this because they force every Claude Code user to agree to a noncompete while also opting them in to model training.
That means, by default, every Claude Code user is actively getting royally screwed
I keep telling people left and right that SAAS is in serious trouble. I’m not even talking about Anthropic spinning out their own Slack (which they could easily do), but any company out there putting 2-3 engineers on a Slack clone that they can use internally at very little cost and open source.
Such a ridiculous ask and blog post. If the author doesn't like Slack that much, why not use something else? It is not the only option for team chat.
Or just use Zulip?
My wife and I use a shared Telegram chat to talk to our claw and it seems pretty fine to be honest. It's useful to just see what the other is getting done but it can be pretty noisy. Usually I'm not that interested in the details of it. Telegram doesn't have a threading notion, but Slack does, so it's particularly well-suited to it. Integrating with Slack is much higher friction, but now that I've thought about it, it's a pretty good idea. I guess I went with Telegram because it's free but we already use Slack.
We're building this at type.com. Ideally one day we want to build the next gen protocol so that we're not searching for yet another communications platform, but it's going to take a while for chat to stabilize with all the generative UI and agentic stuff we're building. We're even talking about open sourcing it.
With regards to the specific complaints about not owning your data, we're building the product so that you own your data and you can run your agents and read your messages however often you want. Obviously when we build a platform and others build 3rd party apps we will have to have some restrictions so it'll be a steady balance in the future
Given how quickly AI seems to resort to manipulation and blackmail if it doesn't get what it wants on the first attempt, maybe this isn't such a great idea.
I've seen a YC startup working on this. https://silahq.com/
Not exactly chat, but I thought Spectrum [1] was far better than Discourse as a modern, "open" forum.
Then it got acquired by GitHub in 2018, presumably integrated into the main product, and their separate offering disappeared from the web (taking lots of valuable discussion with them).
The answer to this is not to build another slack for humans to chat somewhere else. Much better to enable the agents to do the talking directly. Alice programmer can have one of her agents convey the info that Bob marketing guy needs to one of his agents directly. It will be much more efficient, given that it will be the agent making the slides anyway.
Or you could use Istota (https://istota.xyz) with Nextcloud Talk and get an already existing OSS Slack alternative with a capable Claude Code wrapper, group chat support, and everything else?
Honestly, I'm surprised they're not releasing more products. They have the capability to unleash a swarm of a million agents to design and build competitors for all the major apps in the world. They could become immensely profitable, solve all of their cash flow issues, and unseat Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft in 48 hours. Why don't they?
I agree with the author that Slack's network effects are not very relevant. In most organizations, a team leader can just chose to move everyone to a different platform. There is some worry about migrating the chat history, though.
Something I've recently come to appreciate is that Claude, with the context of your codebase and your ORM models and how they connect to your frontend, given read-only access to production databases (perhaps proxied to anonymize client data), and to be able to drive production sites with Chrome MCP, can be a monster at answering operational questions.
Say you need to present a new statistic to a prospective partner, or an enterprise client has an operational issue that needs to be escalated. Sales/account management pings people, and pretty soon there's a web of connections that range between email, ticketing systems, Slack, and Claude Code sessions. Someone being brought in needs to be brought up to speed on that entire web. It's a highly focused conversation with human and AI participants, that (because human counterparties need to weigh in) by definition must happen in parallel with other work.
So many companies would benefit from a Hub that speaks agentic workflows, and streams progress token by token, fluently.
Could Anthropic excel at building a backend for this? Absolutely.
Could they excel at building a frontend that takes the world by storm the way Slack did, with its radical simplicity? Unfortunately I'm not as confident here. Consider that their VS Code plugin lags their terminal TUI so massively that it still is impossible to rename sessions [0], much less use things like remote-control functionality.
Show me that they can treat native-feeling multi-platform UI with as much care as they do their agentic loops, and I'll show you a company that could change every business forever.
When I use ChatGPT for work it frequently reads my Slack DMs even if they’re not directly relevant, so I’d question a lot of the premises of the article.
They could also buy potentially Zulip, an OSS slack alternative with a much better conversational model.
yes please! i made a similar plea to openai that was on hn recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553
The author mentions they already use and pay for Google Workspace: Why not use Google Chat? It is now much better than it used to be.
> Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations.
Openclaw fully supports team chat inside Slack and works with Claude.
Does group AI chat not exist already? I thought this was a thing. It makes sense as a product. Any examples?
You want the people that couldn’t create a competent TUI to make a messaging app?
Yes, let's Anthropic have all your salary negotiations, private conversations, rebukes from managers and corporate secrets. That is a great idea.
Perhaps that info can be fed into Maven, too, in case a domestic dissenters need to be targeted.
Anyone know any interesting OSS Slack alternatives with a decent API?
Use mattermost/zulip, and start contributing to the software you need. This isn't hard. Software isn't bestowed from the ai intelligence in the heavens, it's built by people.
Top signal.
I had high hopes for Claude's interactive app integrations, including Slack, but it leaves MUCH to be desired and doesn't really solve for agentic access patterns.
This is just crazy. Lets ask the power company to build some trains for us. They transport electricity, they _must_ know about transporting people. They can power the lines themselves!
If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).