alt Hacker News[I work for Slack, opinions very much my own]
Having agents see everything you and your colleagues see is cool.
The challenge comes when you want to make certain things private to certain people. In that world you don’t want multiplayer agents leaking data, so you end up having to write and maintain complex rulesets about what specific resources agents have access to.
Single-player agents, on the other hand, are much more straightforward — they act on a single user’s behalf, and then the challenge is ensuring the single-player agent cannot exfiltrate private data into a shared space unless the user specifically permits it.
Replies
My understanding of what they were saying Buzz is is that agents are "1st class" users in their own right, rather than being an app integration.
If you have a user called Claude, then you just apply ACL as normal & you don't care if they're human or bot, right?
I agree with what you are saying but this is not how we solved the issue with who can access what.
In our cloud harness we have the notion of shared and private secrets. When something is authenticated with a shared secret it is basically something that can be used in a public setting. If something is private then it can be only accessed via trusted channel. It works for slack, telegram, etc.
In fact, our slack agents are very strong this department and it is guaranteed there is zero leak of private information.
Maybe this is naive or startup-brained of me: I understand not wanting HR-related things to be potentially exposed by a misaligned agent, but when it comes purely to the building of software I personally do not care at all who can read the code/discussions & engage with the process.
> so you end up having to write and maintain complex rulesets about what specific resources agents have access to.
Why wouldn't you simply use the group chat ID (+more) to key the conversations on?
all ingested data and all derivations of that data can link to source channel and associated ACL that syncs with the source. then search/reads/etc just join on and respect the ACL. not that complicated to manage for things like slack, meetings, etc.
The product seems to use the same 'scoping' mechanism that humans would use, so you can give agents access to whatever 'channels' you want.
The issue seems to be that they 'invented' an auth and permission protocol instead of delegating to something existing, it would be as if they thought their idea of permissions were novel.
Seems easy for Buzz to solve. I’m just happy to have an alternative to Slack.
Private groups are the worst thing in a truly collaborative environment. Would be nice in Slack to have a Publish this whole freaking thread to a public channel button.