Anthropic, please make a new Slack

https://www.fivetran.com/blog/anthropic-please-make-a-new-slack

by georgewfraser • 5 months ago

272 251 5 months ago

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?

georgewfraser4• 5 months ago

You can only access public channel data, you can't even access that at scale, and Claude needs to be more natively integrated in ways that Slack will never allow.

mgraczyk3• 5 months ago

Slack is $45/user/month

Soon you'll be able to write, host, and maintain a fully customizable version for probably 20k/month

If you have a lot of employees this makes sense

ellg• 5 months ago

If people wanted to do this theyd be self hosting xmpp servers already. No one wants to write and maintain the code and infra for things like this, you are grossly underestimating the effort involved here.

matharmin• 5 months ago

What features are you using that the $18/user/month plan doesn't cover?

bandrami6• 5 months ago

We've had xmpp for decades; the issue is that companies don't want to be responsible for it not that they can't do it

mogili1• 5 months ago

Slack's API rate limits and design make it difficult to replicate the data within Slack to a data store that can then be used to provide context to AI agents.

You are forced to use their MCP and their realtime search APIs, which don't work very well/not performant and may require additional licensing.

andymadson• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

"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.

pedalpete• 5 months ago

How google hasn't been able to do this with messenger is beyond me.

The external partners on our slack are almost all logged in via gmail or other google workspace. We are on google workspace as well.

riwsky• 5 months ago

cries in google wave

QuercusMax• 5 months ago

Google decided to build a new chat app every two years instead of keeping the good bits of the original chat app they had and evolving it. It was endlessly frustrating to me when I was at Google. Google's security team ended up banning Slack access after several teams started expensing it.

It doesn't seem like building something that works well would be that hard; we've had nearly 40 years to learn from IRC, AIM, and others. Why can't I run my own chat client that does what I want? Oh, because you gotta lock people in. Sucks.

kccqzy• 5 months ago

If you are on Google Workspace, just use chat.google.com: it's not bad. All it takes is just a benevolent dictator (or more realistically a bean counter) at work saying they don't want the company to pay for Slack in addition to Google Workspace.

andoando• 5 months ago

There was a guy here plugging his slack alternative that was heavily AI based and people here loved it. I don't remember the name unfortunately

julienreszka• 5 months ago

the fact nobody wants to admit is that social is the opposite dimension of productivity that’s why slack and teams are terrible product that try to combine both

etchalon• 5 months ago

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.

petercooper2• 5 months ago

Or, you know, Vibe code your own.

Right. If these tools are so good (and they are) there should be numerous better-than-Slack apps by now that let you do exactly what you want. It doesn't take Anthropic to make it. (At our company, we cheated and edited 37signals' Campfire instead because we got sick of Slack's ads pushed into our paid instance.)

quesera3• 5 months ago

Wait, what? You get ads in Slack?

That sounds crazy to me, but the other interpretation (that Campfire has ads for Slack) seems even crazier.

trjordan• 5 months ago

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

georgewfraser4• 5 months ago

Also true! The most important thing is that the NewSlacks commit to interoperability. I think Anthropic has a special opportunity to lead the way here, because they have a track record of standing by their principles to an extraordinary degree.

coder543• 5 months ago

Why on earth would Anthropic commit to interoperability?

That is the company that doesn't interoperate with the standard LLM APIs that OpenAI developed, which everyone else in the industry has adopted and uses. Whether OpenAI's APIs are great or perfect or not, they are the standard that the industry has settled on.

That is the same company that refuses to add support for AGENTS.md that everyone else in the industry uses, despite over 3000 upvotes: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235

Anthropic's Claude Code is also one of the only agentic coding CLI tools that isn't open source.

I'm not sure which principles you think Anthropic stands by... but interoperability is not one of their strong suits, from what I've seen.

hungryhobbit• 5 months ago

Yeah, but now I wouldn't touch anything from that company with a ten foot pole, even if they made the best Slack replacement ever.

bigyabai• 5 months ago

Considering their Palantir partnership, I'm not sure I'd touch an Anthropic-designed slack either.

sanex• 5 months ago

You must be the only one that remembers this because the rest of the comments are dumping on the idea. I don't think it's such a bad one. Presumably its easier for their agents to knock out than a web browser or a compiler.

xemoka3• 5 months ago

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).

j453• 5 months ago

Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it.

Slack itself originally ran on irc servers as the back end, and I consider it a modern IRC implementation.

troupo9• 5 months ago

Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it.

So why can't Anthropic build a CLI client that doesn't flickr and doesn't consume 68 GB to run a CLI wrapper on top of their API? https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987

bensyverson2• 5 months ago

Yeah, I have so much less patience for "this should exist" posts. In 2026, you could argue that this blog post should have come with a link to the repo.

johnfn3• 5 months ago

Is it really so different than asking the search company back in '01 to make a mail client, a browser, a maps app, ...?

furyofantares• 5 months ago

Was anyone asking them to do that?

Many people now think they should be broken up.

rdtsc• 5 months ago

I didn’t ask them. Did you?

xemoka3• 5 months ago

They didn't, no one asked google to do it. It was Paul Buchheit's 20% project. Google saw a good thing, solved by someone who knew what they were doing and where they wanted it to go, and fostered it. Hell, it is what built AdWords and ultimately made google the advertising behemoth it is today. I don't think this is the same thing...

I see what you are saying though, a business can expand beyond it's initial constraints, but I'm not sure that chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.

troupo9• 5 months ago

1. No one asked them.

2. Half (or more) of those things they bought.

echelon5• 5 months ago

No. This is a CEO expressing righteous indignation about a company that provides (seemingly) little value and has almost no competition.

Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. And Slack costs way too much. If there were any competitors, the price would drop significantly. It's not like chat is a hard problem. And Slack's app is an absolute bear.

troupo9• 5 months ago

Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful.

Ah yes. It's shameful that Slack won't open data moat to AI. You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this

mbb70• 5 months ago

> "almost no competition"
> "costs way too much"
> "It's not like chat is a hard problem"

Surely these statements can't all be true. Since Slack is expensive and has little competition, I think chat is a harder problem than you think.

nkrisc• 5 months ago

You’re saying it’s an easy problem with an expensive solution and yet there’s no competition? Seems there must be more to it because that makes little sense to me.

sumedh• 5 months ago

And Slack costs way too much.

MS Teams is free.

uxp100• 5 months ago

That’s a funny analogy because some electric railway companies owned power generation. The one in my town also sold electricity to consumers for some time, though most of the history I can find online focuses on the rail aspect, which makes sense, as they started and ended in the rail business, but at some point in the 1890s to 1930s appended “and light” to their name.

xemoka3• 5 months ago

It is funny isn't it? I believe it was the opposite direction mostly though, as you say, "railway... and light"; to solve their own problems of powering their infrastructure to move people, they got into power generation at a time when there weren't as many players doing what they needed to run their primary business. I'm not sure that power generation getting into trains would be as effective. Nor do I think an LLM/AI company getting into chat and discussions would be valuable. It feels wrong. But hey, "happy" to move on to yet another chat program in my life if it's better than what we got...

just-the-wrk• 5 months ago

I think this person is asking the most effective entity they can find. Anthropic's offerings are better than the competition. CC and MCP came out of of their labs, and everybody scrambled to copy or adopt them. Their models consistently work better than the competition. Whenever a feature seems inevitable, they release a subtly polished version.

For years I struggled to answer "what company is Apple's equivalent in software?" and I think it might be Anthropic.

cush2• 5 months ago

The title is the issue. They're just asking for group chats with Claude

fragmede• 5 months ago

And other people as well, at which point they have basically recreated slack.

jinushaun2• 5 months ago

But group chat is chat. Even the chat interface with Claude is chat. You can also say the same for any sort of commenting system. Posts and comments, tweets and comments, etc.

I’ve built such system many times. They’re basically all the same, especially if you introduce real time updates. Channels and threads are just organization strategies.

sathish3162• 5 months ago

It might be extremely expensive to build Claude into every group chat.

A better option is to have Claude as an assistant or bot in every group chat and triggered when needed. That is just a different interface for Claude or Cowork chat with the group chat context.

Leaving aside the implementation details, the call for action here is valid since Slack is a black hole of your enterprise data and tribal knowledge and Slack is extremely restrictive. Try using Slack MCP in Claude Chat or any AI product

1970-01-01• 5 months ago

It's not crazy, but it is much too soon. Think about GE going from lightbulbs to radios to alarm clock radios.

paradox4602• 5 months ago

General electric did produce locomotives for decades

ceejayoz• 5 months ago

And modern diesel trains just run a generator to power the electric motors.

linkjuice4all• 5 months ago

GE and others also had marketing campaigns that pushed electric appliances [0]. Yes, GE did make consumer appliances but they also made many production and supply components so it was clearly in their interest to promote this new wonder to build demand and a customer base.

It's almost shocking that these AI companies aren't "magicking" up open source replacements for things like Slack, even as just a proof-of-concept. And if not the providers directly, this seems like an easy win for agencies/organizations that build crap to show off "how good they are at AI".

Lastly, where's the one-person start up that's putting Slack, JIRA, and Photoshop out of business? I believe in the value of these tools but there's clearly more progress required before we can type in "replace slack and generate me a million dollars, make no mistakes".

[0] https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medall...

ninjha• 5 months ago

matrix would be everywhere

now i know the bar is 1000 feet below the earth with teams but matrix is still only maybe a foot or two above the surface

i really want to like it but every few months i try it and it’s clearly just not ready :(

debo_2• 5 months ago

Wasn't Slack a gaming company that accidentally became a chat company?

aaronbrethorst• 5 months ago

just like Flickr was a game that accidentally became a photo sharing website.

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/633164558/slack-flickr-stewar...

Stewart Butterfield is absolutely terrible at making games, but incredibly good at building successful companies.

mezzode2• 5 months ago

You're thinking of Discord

gspetr• 5 months ago

Andreessen Horowitz was a major backer of Slack's predecessor, Tiny Speck, which was originally building a game called Glitch.

When Glitch failed in 2012, founder Stewart Butterfield offered to return the remaining $6 million to investors. Ben Horowitz instead encouraged Butterfield to pivot and build out the internal communication tool the team had developed for themselves, which eventually became Slack.

I saw an interview (don't have the link at hand unfortunately) where Horowitz said he didn't much care for the $6M as he had already been set at that point moneywise, and essentially wanted to gamble on an off chance Slack succeeds.

Horowitz continued to support the company through its rapid growth and eventual direct public offering (DPO) in 2019.

paulsutter• 5 months ago

The model companies are the new OS, you bet they are thinking about projects like this

amelius• 5 months ago

Hey they can ask Anthropic, but they are using the wrong channel for asking. The right url for such questions is claude.ai.

jayd162• 5 months ago

If they sell a magic app building machine, its not crazy to ask them build an app with it, is it?

sonofhans• 5 months ago

Of course it is. Making shovels and digging holes are different skills and require different organizations.

vdfs• 5 months ago

To be fair they can, they'll just run 10k agents and some $20k worth of tokens and they will have a slack replacement without any manual coding, Sure it will have missing features like search and permissions, security will be figured out later, and you can't compile it on your machine, but it's 80% done, how hard can that 20% be?

vrighter• 5 months ago

why don't you buy a subscription and ask the magic machine yourself.... You just need to take out your credit card....

Rebelgecko• 5 months ago

Why do that when they can sell you a shovel to do it yourself?

cyanydeez• 5 months ago

Can you imagine how well they'd sell their product if they could actually demonstrate it's capabilities by just, at a whim, duplicating a non-trivial software product.

khaosdoctor3• 5 months ago

I mean, the idea itself (of having <insert your AI minion here> inside Slack) has crossed my mind multiple times, and I have successfully extract some data using AI from it and it's actually really useful.

But I agree, having Anthropic building this is like having DJI building planes because they know how to create things that fly.

wakawaka28• 5 months ago

Imagine thinking instant messaging is hard after 30+ years of it...

sathish3162• 5 months ago

Cowork Chat. Anthropic can do this.

What is wrong with this line of thinking? Anthropic is the power company that has a 3D printer to make a faster Maglev than anyone.

If Enterprise companies are restrictive to make your own data their only moat, that moat can be broken. Have you tried building any AI agent or using an AI product with Slack MCP? This is one of the hardest problems in SaaS data access and Slack tries to literally block any form of API or OAuth based access. Even Google workspace is not that restrictive and has opened up a cli for the workspace.

troupo9• 5 months ago

Anthropic is the power company that has a 3D printer to make a faster Maglev than anyone.

And yet they can't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281246

joshAg• 5 months ago

It's not crazy at all. That's what conglomerates do. GE literally built trains and electricity until 2021 when the train unit got spun off.

KronisLV• 5 months ago

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).

I think all of the big tools are drowning in complexity by trying to be hugely scalable, integrate with a whole bunch of different tools and so on.

What most of us need is SimpleSlack or SimpleDiscord - something you can deploy on a cheap VPS as a single instance for your community/company of 10-200 members. No complex federation, no enterprise crap, just channels, media, voice and video calls with screen sharing and search, probably an API. Single Go binary for the RESTful API and SSE, PostgreSQL and Garage/SeaweedFS for object storage, maybe an additional binary for handling calls/video cause the hardware requirements of that use case kick everyone's butt and that thin will inevitably crash. Docker containers for resource limits and management.

Something a bit like phpBB back in the day, but more instant messaging, although one could imagine supporting the forum format too. Network effect be damned.

Mattermost is pretty close to that, though they place a bunch of restrictions on you in regards to calls, last I checked. Stoat looks pretty cool, though, hadn't seen much of it before! Maybe Zulip for the people that need something with fewer restrictions (though the mobile app push notification limitations are weird, still hate how mobile OSes handle that per-app).

godelski4• 5 months ago

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

j453• 5 months ago

Has Matrix improved the ease of use for folks to use it independently?

Mattermost, Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out.

godelski4• 5 months ago

I listed those as examples of where one could start. Not as ready to ship answers. I mean we are in a thread where the context is no ready to ship answer, so...

georgewfraser4• 5 months ago

Claude-in-Slack is a big enough feature to overcome the slack-connect network effect. Openness is absolutely key! I wrote this post because I hoped that if Anthropic is already planning to do this I might be able to influence them to make open-data part of the plan. But openness by itself isn't a big enough feature to get users.

godelski4• 5 months ago

It really sounds like you're asking for something else. More like multiple people to be able to talk to the same instance. Which that's a very different thing than Slack

a3w• 5 months ago

They seem to not want a messenger, they want a multiuser-first prompt.

KaiserPro• 5 months ago

something better like Matrix

matrix isn't fun.

The other thing that I would gently point out is that anthropic's uptime is pretty atrocious

godelski4• 5 months ago

Cool. And?

Those were examples, not answers. Those examples aren't exactly compatible with one another (though bridges exist, but you can bridge anything).

NewJazz• 5 months ago

Slack isn't either? And matrix is just a protocol ... Maybe a fun client can be built on top of it, eh?

jinushaun2• 5 months ago

Did you read the article? It’s not a crazy ask. They want multi-user Claude sessions. But what stops the humans from talking to each other? Boom! You suddenly have Slack.

gentleman11• 5 months ago

Just use mattermost. We alrrady have an open source wlack replqcement.

empath75• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

swyx3• 5 months ago

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

troupo9• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Or just use Zulip?

sp1nningaway• 5 months ago

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.

toraway• 5 months ago

It's a retread of another (also baffling) "Why OpenAI Should Build Slack" post from a popular AI Substack.

Just more empty grist for the AI adjacent content mill. "Slack sucks" doesn't let you draft off the current hype zeitgest, so we get "content" like this.

https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...

nitwit005• 5 months ago

A large portion of the AI related response pieces fail to reference what they're responding to. I have to assume it's a side effect of how they're using AI to write them.

Jaysobel• 5 months ago

Not to mention the CEO in question maintains some of the worst customer relations in the data vertical.

Fivetran is infamously bad to its users

khaosdoctor3• 5 months ago

I didn't even know this company before this article

georgewfraser4• 5 months ago

I assure you I wrote it myself

htrp• 5 months ago

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

edgarvaldes• 5 months ago

It's a good test, no doubt. Many engineers are convinced that SaaS is practically dead, since all companies can vibecode their way to a lesser dependence on external (and paid!) software.

hunterpayne3• 5 months ago

You have a funny way of spelling stock analysis.

This take fundamentally misunderstands just about every aspect of running a successful software company. Today SAAS companies make 10x what the AI companies make in revenue. In 2 years time, this will still be true. In 5 years time, this will still be true. In 10 years time, this will still be true...etc...

The amount of time writing new code is a rounding error on the costs of a software business. Losing customers to bugs, downtime and other costs having to do with maintenance are far higher. Optimizing new code writing time at the expense of everything else is just foolish and only something that someone who has never run a software business could believe.

defined• 5 months ago

Messaging apps are a lot harder to get right than you might think. I worked for years on messaging using XMPP and the problems were legion. I'd be very interested in seeing how a vibecoded app does at scale, especially with the presence problem.

overgard• 5 months ago

Just vibe code it yourself! </s>

kennywinker• 5 months ago

It’s hilarious to see half the “just vibe code it yourself!” comments are sarcastic, and the other half are serious…

Haksak• 5 months ago

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.

quesera3• 5 months ago

It's not clear to me that Anthropic is worse than Salesforce.

Or Microsoft, or Google.

crimsoneer• 5 months ago

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.

paxys2• 5 months ago

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

swyx3• 5 months ago

you must be new to fivetran (hint: check their naming)

malchow• 5 months ago

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

Robdel12• 5 months ago

Ha, I’ve had a Mattermost instance for years until they handicapped the most recent version by limiting the number of messages on the self hosted version.

I ended up building my own alternative and was going to OSS it but like… there’s already a bunch out there.

Anyway, Mattermost might not be the choice these days. With that stunt I was annoyed enough to spend a weekend to replace what they were to me.

pcthrowaway• 5 months ago

I ended up building my own alternative and was going to OSS it but like… there’s already a bunch out there.

I'm not aware of anything besides Zulip.. what am I missing?

ed_mercer• 5 months ago

Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations.

Openclaw fully supports team chat inside Slack and works with Claude.

juanre• 5 months ago

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.

btown• 5 months ago

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.

[0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24472

krashidov• 5 months ago

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

glerk2• 5 months ago

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.

BoneShard• 5 months ago

So basically spend 500K-1M per year for a worse slack?

glerk2• 4 months ago

Not at all, I don't mean full time. I mean put 2-3 engineers on building a slack clone which with AI and available open source examples would take roughly 2 weeks. Then it's just keeping the lights on, maybe fix a bug every once in a while. And yes, it will probably be worse than slack, but it's internal software, doesn't have to be perfect.

purplerabbit• 5 months ago

Anyone know any interesting OSS Slack alternatives with a decent API?

ktimespi2• 5 months ago

I've heard Zulip is a good alternative

crabmusket2• 5 months ago

Not just a decent API, but fully open-source and self-hostable.

ValentineC• 5 months ago

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).

[1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum

b00ty4breakfast2• 5 months ago

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?

moomoo112• 5 months ago

Why do you care so much? Do you have life changing equity or are part of the founding team? Or are you just an employee expense line item?

Ancalagon• 5 months ago

why do you care so little? it only represents thousands of peoples livelihoods.

b00ty4breakfast2• 5 months ago

Because this hypothetical heap could end up being used at a company that has my personally identifying information on file. If you don't care about the cavalier usage of AI chatbots and vibecoded software in these organizations then you aren't paying enough attention.

asim• 5 months ago

Does group AI chat not exist already? I thought this was a thing. It makes sense as a product. Any examples?

oasisbob• 5 months ago

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.

willbur1230• 5 months ago

they dont let you extract messages via the API. Keeping Slack message data in their walled garden

sadeshmukh• 5 months ago

You can do workspace wide data export

ahussain• 5 months ago

Doesn't the conversation.history permission let a Slack bot extract all messages? https://docs.slack.dev/reference/methods/conversations.histo...

Esophagus42• 5 months ago

Yes - and I have never actually needed data access anyway.

I treat Slack as mostly ephemeral, and any real knowledge should be put into source control.

paxys2• 5 months ago

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.

sergiotapia• 5 months ago

There's a dude that worked at one of the chinese ai labs that left to build this.

https://slock.ai/#features

Never used it but interesting

daxfohl• 5 months ago

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.

apublicfrog2• 5 months ago

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.

lukev• 5 months ago

Also there are a ton of other ways to skin that cat… you could vibe code a Slack plugin to make this work in like 15 minutes.

causal• 5 months ago

Also these plugins already exist. How on Earth is this post even getting upvoted right now what in the world is going on here.

gigatexal• 5 months ago

lol. This is rich coming from fivetran which extorts people for a relatively straightforward service that’s just annoying enough (looking at you salesforce + QuickStart views) to be worth buying.

But yeah slack could use some competition. Let’s see it would Make sense. It would make anthemic even more sticky in the enterprise.

fathermarz• 5 months ago

I actually vibe with this. I like the engineers and UX people at Anthro. And Slack is actually the most insecure hot mess of an enterprise app you can get.

agnishom• 5 months ago

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.

arjie• 5 months ago

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.

imarkphillips• 5 months ago

Try Pumble. We switched years ago.

bool3max• 5 months ago

You want the people that couldn’t create a competent TUI to make a messaging app?

durakot• 5 months ago

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?

ngrilly• 5 months ago

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.

bionhoward• 5 months ago

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

BitsAndObjects3• 5 months ago

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.

flyrain2• 5 months ago

Zulip is not even close to Slack. It keeps crashing.

BitsAndObjects3• 5 months ago

Sounds like something Claude could fix… /s

tabbott2• 5 months ago

I lead the Zulip project and I'm not aware of any common crash issues with either our server or any of our apps.

Can you share details on what you're experiencing with us? https://zulip.com/help/contact-support.

nicoburns• 5 months ago

I've been using a couple of different Zulip servers for professional communication for several years and haven't had any issues.

ilsubyeega• 5 months ago

FWIW, Zulip is in GSoC this year, so whoever interested in here, i encourage to participate it yea

gitaarik• 5 months ago

Have used it for years without any problems. Not much recently though, but can't imagine they suddenly became unstable.

crabmusket2• 5 months ago

This. Zulip's topics map exactly to AI chats - you can have the whole team and the bot focused on one thing.

The Zulip team has been admirably cautious with their own approach to AI in the product - which I am so thankful for! - but I am sure someone out there has built the integration to get bots deeply into a Zulip org. And if not, building that integration is so much more achievable than rebuilding the whole of Slack.

artrockalter• 5 months ago

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.

skeledrew• 5 months ago

Hmm what about Mattermost?

elAhmo• 5 months ago

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.

avivo• 5 months ago

They could also buy potentially Zulip, an OSS slack alternative with a much better conversational model.

suprjami• 5 months ago

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.

AvAn12• 5 months ago

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?

recursive2• 5 months ago

I guess now we have the technology to use the UI layer as the API. Spin up a browser and impersonate the user, and then parse/OCR the data off the screen.

maplethorpe• 5 months ago

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?

6thbit• 5 months ago

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.

probabletrain• 5 months ago

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.

dokdev• 5 months ago

I've seen a YC startup working on this. https://silahq.com/

conception2• 5 months ago

Mattermost is 90% of Slack. It’s great. We migrated to it in a couple of hours, full Slack import.

cardanome• 5 months ago

This.

Mattermost works great plus you can self host it. Can only recommend it.

conception2• 5 months ago

Also supports a billion more languages than slack!

rglover• 5 months ago

Top signal.

ktimespi2• 5 months ago

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...

bandrami6• 5 months ago

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

morkalork• 5 months ago

That hasn't stopped Google from building chat features into their apps a dozen or so times

Esophagus42• 5 months ago

Combined with the fact that I actually don’t even hate Slack…

therealdrag0• 5 months ago

Ya slack is great. What’s the problem.

wmeredith• 5 months ago

Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

bandrami6• 5 months ago

Slack"s data policy being "no" is a big reason companies are willing to use it. Change that and that willingness goes away.

hbarka• 5 months ago

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.

sanilnz• 5 months ago

This is funny thought to because after FiveTran bought census they have upped a bill from 30K to 180K for same running service, syncing to a couple of Google sheets. We are comfortable with maintaining the service now and built with Claude Code, moving service in house.

So question why do we need Five team by same argument?

theptip• 5 months ago

I think Jira / Linear is the more likely next target. They just promoted Todos to Tasks (with dependencies), and you’ll need some more mature solution for agent swarms.

Cowork / Code are interfaces for individual knowledge workers, the PM / EM team orchestration layer is the obvious play for ‘26.

squirrellous• 5 months ago

I know the world has moved on but like, use emails, man.

reacharavindh• 5 months ago

Or may be an Open Slack that is as good as Slack :-)

dzhiurgis• 5 months ago

That's why Salesforce is so well positioned here. Entire data, client interactions (crm) and admin team (slack) is already mostly there.

For developer like me - Slack bot already proven useful digging out info. Slack also supports kanban so probably can replace jira/asana/etc for documenting system. In Salesforce "vibes" already can tell a lot of stuff about your Salesforce implementation. Connect it all up and you got pretty useful package. Sadly Salesforce is moving too slow here.

For group chats chatgpt has that, but not the same. I think the closest is Airtable where you can collab on data.

up2isomorphism• 5 months ago

I think it is literally easier for Anthropic to make a fivetran in stead.

casey2• 5 months ago

Misanthropic, please make a new slack with one 9

gaigalas• 5 months ago

You can just ask others to build things.

erelong• 5 months ago

alternatives like matrix exist... maybe some vibecoders could take a project like that and try to "soup it up"

mannycalavera42• 5 months ago

aren't there very good alternatives already? (e.g. mattermost)

dostick• 5 months ago

There’s Anytype and few others. Problem is not replacement , it’s adoption.

treexs• 5 months ago

Asking the company that is banning use of their subscription in other services, when other subscriptions like Codex and OpenCode don't, to make something that is interoperable with similar systems. Alright lol

zoezoezoezoe• 5 months ago

I really like the idea of a work chat that could somehow be intelligently summarized, organized, and searched or shared via LLMs.

Anthropic, please make a new Slack

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