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).
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?
But this is a magic shovel that digs holes and tunnels all by itself exactly as intended. It should be able to do this without any special skill involved in prompting it.
You're thinking post-scarcity. We aren't there yet, but one say well have a magic wand, magic shovel, and magic anything else that is currently scarce.
Sorry, I don't follow how a sarcastic joke about the claims of post-scarcity would make me a ludite or imply that I am saying models today aren't useful for certain tasks.
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.
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.
Why does it seem like everyone is having trouble grasping an analogy? GP was saying that as it doesn't make sense for a power company to solve trains (because it is out of their area of expertise) it doesn't make sense for Anthropic to solve Slack (because it is out of their area of expertise). My response is that a surprising number of things can fall in the area of expertise of a technology company, and this has been proven by Google in the past.
Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.
People look for something to disagree with, and make posts that "engage". I agree with you and see this a lot, an analogy clearly makes point A but people get hung up on detail B.
Yep, and it was completely just fluke too, because within 5 years of that they'd butchered/tamed the whole concept of 20% and that kind of independent project wasn't a thing anybody at Google could do, even if 20% still nominally existed [re-routed to be "you can add 20% to some project at Google that already exists and is approved by corporate already, etc. and btw you'll still be doing your normal work for most of the time, too"]
When I was there from 2012-2022 it really wasn't a thing. Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
> Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
You know, I've never looked at Valve in that light before.
Once you have a money printing machine, of course any corporate hierarchy becomes antithetical to creativity, because there are huge financial rewards for climbing up. And the primary way you climb up is by turning direct reports to complete tasks you get rewarded for.
I think everyone at the time was hoping that Google was going to take on their pet project; my friends and I certainly were. But I don't think that has to do with my comment, which is around a more metaphorical use of the word 'ask'.
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.
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.
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...
> 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).
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.
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
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.
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.
Its not hard. Its capital intensive with a low profit margin. So it doesn't attract a lot of competition because you can make more money in other ways that have moats. There are at least a dozen other chat apps, some of which are decades old.
To have a successful chat business, you need the network effect of lots of users (big marketing spend), you need lots of capital for operations (big spend on disks and compute) and after all that you get only a few dollars per user. Its just not a great business on the balance sheet. Notice that quality software doesn't even get a mention in this niche.
You can offload the cost of operations to the end user if you’re B2B. Sell the software as licenses the old school way and offload the cost by allowing users to run their own instances either on prem or on cloud.
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.
> 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
> You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this
I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.
There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born. Breathing in the air molecules that come from other people's bodies. Looking at ugly things. Hearing annoying sounds. It'll be okay.
Could there ever exist anything that wouldn't be okay? What's the difference between something that will be okay and something that won't? I'm guessing the things that will be okay are the things that might pose an obstacle for AI "progress".
The company in the very article this thread is about wants this.
Lots of companies want this.
Companies should have the option. Right now they're completely locked out of taking advantage of AI with their business data locked away in Slack.
Slack is a graveyard.
I would be a customer of this. It's a pain in the ass that I can't just ask a question to an LLM about knowledge that I know is locked away in past conversations. I have to go bug that person and sync up with them. Latency, annoying context switches for everyone, ... these things have a simple solution. Let AI have the data.
> I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.
It does. And a lot of this information is highly sensitive. Imagine my company's surprise if Slack would not be shameful and would just open up its data moat to AI.
> There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born.
Demagoguery and non sequiturs are not arguments.
But I guess that's what passes for "arguments" for AI maximalists.
Slack is monopolizing data access and not giving companies access to their own data.
Companies want to hook up their chat BI to LLMs so it can be instantly and richly queried. Slack search sucks, and an LLM could increase employee efficiency by an order of magnitude. It could also make a lot of requests self serve rather than having employees interrupting each other constantly.
Slack is prohibiting companies from surfacing their own data to AI. They're perhaps worried this will erode their leverage.
That's the entire point here.
Companies should have the option to leverage their chat data for AI rather than having no option at all.
In general the companies are the ones showing reluctance, much more than their employees. There's still a morass of security, privacy, and legal unanswered questions about LLM use in general. Not to mention the huge unknown of total lifecycle costs
And a whole lot of companies will dump Slack if their data policies loosen (they specifically don't want their people feeding proprietary info to an LLM through any channel)
I operate with the assumption that the company can access my private DMs on enterprise slack if they want to. With that, users are still allowed to be concerned if the company is going to use that information for AI use cases. I’d prefer that all AI stay away from my private DMs.
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".
Why sell the output single time. When you can sell the tool that makes output to nearly unlimited times. Competing with your own customers is bad move as it limits number of those hopeful fools.
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.
The thing lags a few seconds while typing a message on a 20 core 128g ram machine. That's with their desktop (electron) app. Mercifully, the web app works better.
Still, CC blows it out of water. Slack is that bad.
Something important must be different about our Slack environments. Maybe it's the number of users, or possibly the OS?
We're a small company (about 150 Slack users), and I've run the Slack (Electron) app on a 16GB M2 (macOS) and a 4GB Chromebook (running a non-ChromeOS Linux), and it has never had any noteworthy performance issues.
It's a terminal wrapper for Anthropic API. It somehow baloons to 68 gigabytes when all it needs to do is call an APi and slowly draw a few hundred characters on screen. And they can't even do that without flickering. Oh yes, and until very recently it would also consume a significant percentage of CPU just waiting for input to a slash command.
Yes, on that same 20 core 128g RAM machine.
You surely must be kidding. Slack is an amazing cutting edge high performance tech in comparison as it has about two orders of magnitude more features that a TUI API wrapper.
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.
I don't want everybody with an idea making a repo. It's already hard enough to filter out the slop in github that I'm reluctant about using anything built in the past year.
It might not have been. But it's not hard to see that whatever productivity coefficient multiplier llms brings, it's being dwarfed by how much easier it is to publish projects that only look good on the surface.
While it's a great tool in the hands of capable and well intentioned people, there's not a world out there where the average quality of software goes up.
Even if AI with autonomous agentic development made something that worked at the average of code quality, I wonder if the code might be a little more sturdy, predictable, and the compromise is a little more verbose for the level that works for the AI to manage it.
Humans would then help oversee the input, insight, and extension and improvement above and below that.
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.
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
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
It is impossible to believe the self-own on Google's messaging platforms. At one point, it seemed that all of my acquaintances used Google Talk. Then years of shutting down perfectly working applications, sometimes without any real user porting. There were even identically named products existing at the same time.
However, I am sure a few Googlers got some tasty promotions out of the mess, so it was all worth poisoning the well.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
No no it makes sense. Hypothetical scenario: I, a high-level employee at a company just convinced my boss (or did we convince each other?) to spend $30k/year on Claude/Codex enterprise licenses. So far, the productivity gains have not been there and we're starting to sweat. So, I propose to my boss to build an internal version of $SaaS and call it a win. Galaxy brain.
Now some IC somewhere in the company who is at the end of his rope and sees the company as a dead end, sees an opportunity. Why not advocate for this project, get real experience building something greenfield in a brand new domain, strengthen their own resume, and finally have a way out of their strut? It's not like they're gonna stick around maintaining what they built.
Most people using Slack, Teams etc. and especially those making purchase decisions have no idea what XMPP is and what it's capable of. Heck, even Facebook used to federate XMPP until they decided to go proprietary. Not in the interest of their users, but because it makes the most money for its shareholders.
I don't pay for slack any more, I just picked the price of their enterprise plan. Large users probably get big discounts but it doesn't matter, the cutoff where this makes sense financially is probably around 4000 employees even at $10/seat
The article mentions some sort of legal audit reasons that the author is of the opinion that any reasonably sized company needs. These features are apparently only on the expensive plan.
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.
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.
I have some feedback that's annoyingly non-specific.
I used Zulip a few years ago as a contractor. It seemed _fine_, but I didn't love it. Specifically, the UI felt sluggish and generally the experience was somewhat unpolished. Maybe things have changed, a lot happens in a couple years, but there you go
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Yes, if I go to Slackbot we get this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HCowV2GXsAAmpXN?format=jpg&name=... - there's no X and no way to get rid of it. Just an ad for their pro plan every time. This is on whatever the normal paid plan is. (We're keeping it around for a few months before we cancel to see if we need to go back on there to find things.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
is that a weird way of adding headcount, my company also does that by anthropomorphizing AI agents and I find it weird. I'd find it natural to call it a 2 person startup (whether you use 1 agent or 100 agents)
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).
If they sell a magic app building machine, its not crazy to ask them build an app with it, is it?
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?
Still better than Slack and Teams.
Of course it is. Making shovels and digging holes are different skills and require different organizations.
But this is a magic shovel that digs holes and tunnels all by itself exactly as intended. It should be able to do this without any special skill involved in prompting it.
You're thinking post-scarcity. We aren't there yet, but one say well have a magic wand, magic shovel, and magic anything else that is currently scarce.
You sound like a low-information luddite. Have you tried this week's latest model? You're probably prompting it wrong.
Sorry, I don't follow how a sarcastic joke about the claims of post-scarcity would make me a ludite or imply that I am saying models today aren't useful for certain tasks.
They too are being sarcastic.
no it isn't
But it's not unreasonable to ask the shovel salesman to show me a hole that model of shovel was used to dig.
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.
Why do that when they can sell you a shovel to do it yourself?
why don't you buy a subscription and ask the magic machine yourself.... You just need to take out your credit card....
Is it really so different than asking the search company back in '01 to make a mail client, a browser, a maps app, ...?
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.
Why does it seem like everyone is having trouble grasping an analogy? GP was saying that as it doesn't make sense for a power company to solve trains (because it is out of their area of expertise) it doesn't make sense for Anthropic to solve Slack (because it is out of their area of expertise). My response is that a surprising number of things can fall in the area of expertise of a technology company, and this has been proven by Google in the past.
Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.
People look for something to disagree with, and make posts that "engage". I agree with you and see this a lot, an analogy clearly makes point A but people get hung up on detail B.
Yep, and it was completely just fluke too, because within 5 years of that they'd butchered/tamed the whole concept of 20% and that kind of independent project wasn't a thing anybody at Google could do, even if 20% still nominally existed [re-routed to be "you can add 20% to some project at Google that already exists and is approved by corporate already, etc. and btw you'll still be doing your normal work for most of the time, too"]
When I was there from 2012-2022 it really wasn't a thing. Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
> Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
You know, I've never looked at Valve in that light before.
Once you have a money printing machine, of course any corporate hierarchy becomes antithetical to creativity, because there are huge financial rewards for climbing up. And the primary way you climb up is by turning direct reports to complete tasks you get rewarded for.
Not that Valve doesn't have its own problems.
i don't know, i think this guy got you dead to rights on how reductive of a point of view you have
> chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.
that's all taking risks means
Was anyone asking them to do that?
Many people now think they should be broken up.
1. No one asked them.
2. Half (or more) of those things they bought.
I didn’t ask them. Did you?
I think everyone at the time was hoping that Google was going to take on their pet project; my friends and I certainly were. But I don't think that has to do with my comment, which is around a more metaphorical use of the word 'ask'.
> 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 :(
Wasn't Slack a gaming company that accidentally became a chat company?
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.
No wonder the game failed, they were busy focusing on some internal chat tool
Precise argument here
So what you're saying is I should build a game engine first before making my game and then I can pivot into selling game engines?
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.
You're thinking of Discord
No, I'm not. The company that became the Slack corporation was originally a game studio : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History
Oh wow, TIL that Slack also started like that
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.
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...
> 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).
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.
> 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
The title is the issue. They're just asking for group chats with Claude
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
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.
And other people as well, at which point they have basically recreated slack.
Slack is more than group chats
Unfortunately.
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.
>> "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.
Its not hard. Its capital intensive with a low profit margin. So it doesn't attract a lot of competition because you can make more money in other ways that have moats. There are at least a dozen other chat apps, some of which are decades old.
To have a successful chat business, you need the network effect of lots of users (big marketing spend), you need lots of capital for operations (big spend on disks and compute) and after all that you get only a few dollars per user. Its just not a great business on the balance sheet. Notice that quality software doesn't even get a mention in this niche.
> Its just not a great business on the balance sheet.
I think that's probably what makes it hard.
You can offload the cost of operations to the end user if you’re B2B. Sell the software as licenses the old school way and offload the cost by allowing users to run their own instances either on prem or on cloud.
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.
> And Slack costs way too much.
MS Teams is free.
> 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
> You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this
I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.
There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born. Breathing in the air molecules that come from other people's bodies. Looking at ugly things. Hearing annoying sounds. It'll be okay.
> It'll be okay.
Could there ever exist anything that wouldn't be okay? What's the difference between something that will be okay and something that won't? I'm guessing the things that will be okay are the things that might pose an obstacle for AI "progress".
> I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.
That’s not a valid argument. The company itself would still need to consent.
The company in the very article this thread is about wants this.
Lots of companies want this.
Companies should have the option. Right now they're completely locked out of taking advantage of AI with their business data locked away in Slack.
Slack is a graveyard.
I would be a customer of this. It's a pain in the ass that I can't just ask a question to an LLM about knowledge that I know is locked away in past conversations. I have to go bug that person and sync up with them. Latency, annoying context switches for everyone, ... these things have a simple solution. Let AI have the data.
> I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.
It does. And a lot of this information is highly sensitive. Imagine my company's surprise if Slack would not be shameful and would just open up its data moat to AI.
> There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born.
Demagoguery and non sequiturs are not arguments.
But I guess that's what passes for "arguments" for AI maximalists.
By focusing on AI, you missed the point.
Slack is monopolizing data access and not giving companies access to their own data.
Companies want to hook up their chat BI to LLMs so it can be instantly and richly queried. Slack search sucks, and an LLM could increase employee efficiency by an order of magnitude. It could also make a lot of requests self serve rather than having employees interrupting each other constantly.
Slack is prohibiting companies from surfacing their own data to AI. They're perhaps worried this will erode their leverage.
That's the entire point here.
Companies should have the option to leverage their chat data for AI rather than having no option at all.
Slack bad.
In general the companies are the ones showing reluctance, much more than their employees. There's still a morass of security, privacy, and legal unanswered questions about LLM use in general. Not to mention the huge unknown of total lifecycle costs
The company writing the article this HN thread is about wants this. Lots of companies do.
Today there is no option because Slack is scared to death of losing their leverage.
Companies want full rights to their data, and Slack is lording over it like a dragon protecting treasure.
And a whole lot of companies will dump Slack if their data policies loosen (they specifically don't want their people feeding proprietary info to an LLM through any channel)
It's amazing how every reply failed to realize you're (and post was) talking about (a) enterprise Slack usage & (b) AI use by the company itself.
I operate with the assumption that the company can access my private DMs on enterprise slack if they want to. With that, users are still allowed to be concerned if the company is going to use that information for AI use cases. I’d prefer that all AI stay away from my private DMs.
There is no privacy in corporate computer systems in the US, legally, as far as I'm aware.
Company pays for the bills = company data
The issue here is that Slack's attempting to build a moat by restricting access by a company to that company's data.
Thereby allowing Salesforce to sell additional features on that same data that only it has access to at scale.
General electric did produce locomotives for decades
And modern diesel trains just run a generator to power the electric motors.
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...
Why sell the output single time. When you can sell the tool that makes output to nearly unlimited times. Competing with your own customers is bad move as it limits number of those hopeful fools.
[dead]
Hey they can ask Anthropic, but they are using the wrong channel for asking. The right url for such questions is claude.ai.
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.
It's not crazy, but it is much too soon. Think about GE going from lightbulbs to radios to alarm clock radios.
The model companies are the new OS, you bet they are thinking about projects like this
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.
Imagine thinking instant messaging is hard after 30+ years of it...
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.
> 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
That's still light years better than Slack.
The thing lags a few seconds while typing a message on a 20 core 128g ram machine. That's with their desktop (electron) app. Mercifully, the web app works better.
Still, CC blows it out of water. Slack is that bad.
Something important must be different about our Slack environments. Maybe it's the number of users, or possibly the OS?
We're a small company (about 150 Slack users), and I've run the Slack (Electron) app on a 16GB M2 (macOS) and a 4GB Chromebook (running a non-ChromeOS Linux), and it has never had any noteworthy performance issues.
It still sucks, but not because of performance.
How is it "light years better than Slack"?
It's a terminal wrapper for Anthropic API. It somehow baloons to 68 gigabytes when all it needs to do is call an APi and slowly draw a few hundred characters on screen. And they can't even do that without flickering. Oh yes, and until very recently it would also consume a significant percentage of CPU just waiting for input to a slash command.
Yes, on that same 20 core 128g RAM machine.
You surely must be kidding. Slack is an amazing cutting edge high performance tech in comparison as it has about two orders of magnitude more features that a TUI API wrapper.
your instance does that. Mine does no such thing and I don’t know anyone for whom it does.
Not to say it doesn’t, but it’s clearly not a universal issue.
They are using react for that
Not even joking
Can’t != not prioritizing
No. They literally can't.
E.g. they claim it's a difficult task to render a few hundred characters on screen, and that their CLI wrapper is a tiny game engine: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
They literally had to buy bun to have someone who understands how things work to fix this
that is 1/8 of Slack so it’d be progress :)
Slack doesn't require nearly as much to run. And Slack has about two orders of magnitude more functionality
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.
I don't want everybody with an idea making a repo. It's already hard enough to filter out the slop in github that I'm reluctant about using anything built in the past year.
I hear you, but it's not like the quality bar on Github was super high before AI
It might not have been. But it's not hard to see that whatever productivity coefficient multiplier llms brings, it's being dwarfed by how much easier it is to publish projects that only look good on the surface.
While it's a great tool in the hands of capable and well intentioned people, there's not a world out there where the average quality of software goes up.
Underrated comment.
Even if AI with autonomous agentic development made something that worked at the average of code quality, I wonder if the code might be a little more sturdy, predictable, and the compromise is a little more verbose for the level that works for the AI to manage it.
Humans would then help oversee the input, insight, and extension and improvement above and below that.
AI could be a baseline.
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.
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
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.
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
They seem to not want a messenger, they want a multiuser-first prompt.
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.
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...
Just use mattermost. We alrrady have an open source wlack replqcement.
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.
> 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
Slack isn't either? And matrix is just a protocol ... Maybe a fun client can be built on top of it, eh?
Cool. And?
Those were examples, not answers. Those examples aren't exactly compatible with one another (though bridges exist, but you can bridge anything).
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.
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...
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.
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
I didn't even know this company before this article
sounds like it was good marketing
I assure you I wrote it myself
"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.
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.
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.
It is impossible to believe the self-own on Google's messaging platforms. At one point, it seemed that all of my acquaintances used Google Talk. Then years of shutting down perfectly working applications, sometimes without any real user porting. There were even identically named products existing at the same time.
However, I am sure a few Googlers got some tasty promotions out of the mess, so it was all worth poisoning the well.
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.
cries in google wave
+1, google wave might have been the best thing Google ever made.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
No no it makes sense. Hypothetical scenario: I, a high-level employee at a company just convinced my boss (or did we convince each other?) to spend $30k/year on Claude/Codex enterprise licenses. So far, the productivity gains have not been there and we're starting to sweat. So, I propose to my boss to build an internal version of $SaaS and call it a win. Galaxy brain.
Now some IC somewhere in the company who is at the end of his rope and sees the company as a dead end, sees an opportunity. Why not advocate for this project, get real experience building something greenfield in a brand new domain, strengthen their own resume, and finally have a way out of their strut? It's not like they're gonna stick around maintaining what they built.
Most people using Slack, Teams etc. and especially those making purchase decisions have no idea what XMPP is and what it's capable of. Heck, even Facebook used to federate XMPP until they decided to go proprietary. Not in the interest of their users, but because it makes the most money for its shareholders.
No they wouldn't have Nobody will write this, AI will write the entire thing. You don't need many people to maintain it
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
What features are you using that the $18/user/month plan doesn't cover?
I don't pay for slack any more, I just picked the price of their enterprise plan. Large users probably get big discounts but it doesn't matter, the cutoff where this makes sense financially is probably around 4000 employees even at $10/seat
The article mentions some sort of legal audit reasons that the author is of the opinion that any reasonably sized company needs. These features are apparently only on the expensive plan.
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.
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.
Zulip is not even close to Slack. It keeps crashing.
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.
Thanks for your work on Zulip!
I have some feedback that's annoyingly non-specific.
I used Zulip a few years ago as a contractor. It seemed _fine_, but I didn't love it. Specifically, the UI felt sluggish and generally the experience was somewhat unpolished. Maybe things have changed, a lot happens in a couple years, but there you go
Just about every UI component has been redesigned over the last two years. So your experience may be different these days :).
<3
I've been using a couple of different Zulip servers for professional communication for several years and haven't had any issues.
Have used it for years without any problems. Not much recently though, but can't imagine they suddenly became unstable.
FWIW, Zulip is in GSoC this year, so whoever interested in here, i encourage to participate it yea
Sounds like something Claude could fix… /s
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
Combined with the fact that I actually don’t even hate Slack…
Ya slack is great. What’s the problem.
Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
That hasn't stopped Google from building chat features into their apps a dozen or so times
> 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.
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.
they dont let you extract messages via the API. Keeping Slack message data in their walled garden
Doesn't the conversation.history permission let a Slack bot extract all messages? https://docs.slack.dev/reference/methods/conversations.histo...
Last May they introduced a new rate limit for that endpoint of 1 request per minute.
you can work around it but i wont say how here because slack is definitely readin gthis
You can do workspace wide data export
> 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.
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.
Also these plugins already exist. How on Earth is this post even getting upvoted right now what in the world is going on here.
For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/
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.
> 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?
I really like the idea of a work chat that could somehow be intelligently summarized, organized, and searched or shared via LLMs.
A similar argument to OpenAI: https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...
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.
Considering their Palantir partnership, I'm not sure I'd touch an Anthropic-designed slack either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Weird to see this kind of random Substack/X content on an official company blog.
you must be new to fivetran (hint: check their naming)
So why can't we vibecode a new slack with claude?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
why do you care so little? it only represents thousands of peoples livelihoods.
I only care when I have incentives to care.
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.
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.
Or just use Zulip?
> 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.
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.
So basically spend 500K-1M per year for a worse slack?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations.
Openclaw fully supports team chat inside Slack and works with Claude.
They could also buy potentially Zulip, an OSS slack alternative with a much better conversational model.
Mattermost is 90% of Slack. It’s great. We migrated to it in a couple of hours, full Slack import.
This.
Mattermost works great plus you can self host it. Can only recommend it.
Also supports a billion more languages than slack!
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
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?
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.
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.
It's not clear to me that Anthropic is worse than Salesforce.
Or Microsoft, or Google.
yes please! i made a similar plea to openai that was on hn recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553
There’s Anytype and few others. Problem is not replacement , it’s adoption.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Yes, if I go to Slackbot we get this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HCowV2GXsAAmpXN?format=jpg&name=... - there's no X and no way to get rid of it. Just an ad for their pro plan every time. This is on whatever the normal paid plan is. (We're keeping it around for a few months before we cancel to see if we need to go back on there to find things.)
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.
Slack"s data policy being "no" is a big reason companies are willing to use it. Change that and that willingness goes away.
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've seen a YC startup working on this. https://silahq.com/
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.
Does group AI chat not exist already? I thought this was a thing. It makes sense as a product. Any examples?
I think it is literally easier for Anthropic to make a fivetran in stead.
You want the people that couldn’t create a competent TUI to make a messaging app?
alternatives like matrix exist... maybe some vibecoders could take a project like that and try to "soup it up"
Anyone know any interesting OSS Slack alternatives with a decent API?
I've heard Zulip is a good alternative
Not just a decent API, but fully open-source and self-hostable.
You can just ask others to build things.
I know the world has moved on but like, use emails, man.
Or may be an Open Slack that is as good as Slack :-)
Misanthropic, please make a new slack with one 9
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.
aren't there very good alternatives already? (e.g. mattermost)
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.
Try Pumble. We switched years ago.
Hmm what about Mattermost?
Top signal.
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is that a weird way of adding headcount, my company also does that by anthropomorphizing AI agents and I find it weird. I'd find it natural to call it a 2 person startup (whether you use 1 agent or 100 agents)
So.. you should build the new slack?
Call it Lull
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Just vibe code it yourself! </s>
It’s hilarious to see half the “just vibe code it yourself!” comments are sarcastic, and the other half are serious…
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