Anthropic, please make a new Slack

anonymouscaller

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?

andymadson

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.

dbt00

"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.

etchalon

Just use one of the many chat products that doesn't have the same access limitations as Slack? Or, you know, Vibe code your own. People are so weird.

trjordan

A similar argument to OpenAI: https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...

xemoka

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).

godelski

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

empath75

If you want Anthropic to make a new slack, just ask Claude to write it for you. It wrote me a trello clone in 15 minutes. Why bother with a SaaS. You can build your own perfect chat system in a weekend.

gamerson

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.

swyx

yes please! i made a similar plea to openai that was on hn recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553

troupo

Anthropic? The company whose CLI wrapper for their own API was consuming 68 GB RAM (yes, that's 68 gigabytes )? https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 You'll rue the day when they decide to release a Slack lookalike.

ninth_ant

Or just use Zulip?

sp1nningaway

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.

htrp

So why can't we vibecode a new slack with claude?

overgard

Just vibe code it yourself! </s>

Haksak

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.

crimsoneer

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.

paxys

Weird to see this kind of random Substack/X content on an official company blog.

malchow

For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/

ed_mercer

> Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. Openclaw fully supports team chat inside Slack and works with Claude.