> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software
I imagine they smushed 2 of the most well-known AI-isms together on purpose here to troll the AI-weary. Might as well I guess, if this type of language annoys you then the whole feature probably will too.
The collective harm that this kind of language does to a human skill of writing by oneself is probably immeasurable (that is until some clever social science researcher finds a controlled way to quantifying this).
The full statement:
> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software: open, collaborative, and powered by both human ingenuity and judgement and agent scale. Teams that build this way won't just move faster. They'll build things no one else can.
I am not sure how just drawing contrasts between two things without actually drawing any kind of causal relationship to explain _why_ something is better or _how_ it does it, came to be a good thing. It is the kind of vaccuous statement that some poor tired sod with his remaining system 1 capacity just YOLOd into the blogoshpere and, like you said, the weary who don't know any better get FOMOed by. PSA: you arent missing anything.
I'm shocked Teams + GitHub haven't already done something like this. But I suppose that's asking a lot from Teams.
I've been using Claude and other agents in Slack for some code tasks. It's mostly fine for simpler projects and products. Things like docs or specific libraries. But I'm not really convinced this is the ideal interface yet. Reviews are my bottleneck and GitHub has a great UI for this. Plus, token consumption with Slack is out of control.
Maybe in time this will be the way we work, but for now I still find myself using GitHub, a terminal, and slack together.
At this point I literally have no idea what modern coding is supposed to look like. I still open my editor, type stuff in and run make. All these tools are released daily and they just fly over my caveman head.
Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct).
Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI?
I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is fine. Stuff still breaks, we fix it. Clients ask "How does XYZ work?" and we say, "Not sure, let us get back to you." And they're totally fine with that answer.
Everything within me screams that this is wrong and we should have intimate familiarity with the system, but I cannot find any evidence that the path of "running a team" instead of "building engineering skill" is not going to work out fine in the long-run. (Yes, my comparison between "team" and "engineering skill" is a bit rough but I'm not interested in the semantics.)
All the evidence that I'm seeing in my own business, with senior engineers meeting clients' needs with autonomous agentic teams is that it's all fine, and while there are gaps, it's actually okay. Clients are happy. Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Bugs are fixed quickly. We ship more in 3 months than we previously could've shipped in a year. I'm baffled and frankly not as advanced as my devs (I still ask questions one by one to my agent, like a Real Caveman!)
It makes me wildly uncomfortable so I'm trying to wrestle with this. I want your statement to be true, but I just don't see evidence of that.
I'm going to chock this one up as a yet-another "X is your agentic coding hub" PR nonsense.
What are people actually using to manage semi-collaborative agentic coding workflows nowadays? We've moved from on-dev-machine coding to @claude in GitHub, but of course GitHub purposefully weakens the capability of that approach to the point that it's kind of a hack. Github/Linear have somewhat more cohesive experiences but it still feels like tooling for agent teaming is quite lacking and unergonomic.
This is probably getting close to the right interface for these things, and that's coming from someone who is religious about using terminals, neovim, etc.
"I know folk's got their ways of doing things. Live where the low fruit hangs, that's how it is." - Charley Crockett
There's plenty of ideas, they just don't have them [1]. It's kind of hilarious to watch all of these people copy each other out of fear while pretending they're being original.
Sounds useful for a PM wanting to spin up a throwaway PoC. But you’d have to rip my IDE from my cold dead hands for any work that extends past the threshold of KTLO.
Hey Slack, how about making workflows less of a pain in the neck to use? In them there is no ability to have branches rejoin to a common path. Worse, an item isn't found in a list it just throws an exception instead of giving me a null item, which oddly I can test for in an if even though it will never happen?
They see the entire universe building their own version of Claude Tag and custom internal bots connected to your internal ecosystem, and realizing that they can fight for some enterprise revenue within their own product that everyone else is currently extracting
This is the easiest sell of the century, product can discuss and implement changes without ever getting engineering involved. Or at least that's the theory, I think everyone here can think of a number of reasons to have reservations on this front.
> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software
I imagine they smushed 2 of the most well-known AI-isms together on purpose here to troll the AI-weary. Might as well I guess, if this type of language annoys you then the whole feature probably will too.
The collective harm that this kind of language does to a human skill of writing by oneself is probably immeasurable (that is until some clever social science researcher finds a controlled way to quantifying this).
The full statement:
> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software: open, collaborative, and powered by both human ingenuity and judgement and agent scale. Teams that build this way won't just move faster. They'll build things no one else can.
I am not sure how just drawing contrasts between two things without actually drawing any kind of causal relationship to explain _why_ something is better or _how_ it does it, came to be a good thing. It is the kind of vaccuous statement that some poor tired sod with his remaining system 1 capacity just YOLOd into the blogoshpere and, like you said, the weary who don't know any better get FOMOed by. PSA: you arent missing anything.
I'm shocked Teams + GitHub haven't already done something like this. But I suppose that's asking a lot from Teams.
I've been using Claude and other agents in Slack for some code tasks. It's mostly fine for simpler projects and products. Things like docs or specific libraries. But I'm not really convinced this is the ideal interface yet. Reviews are my bottleneck and GitHub has a great UI for this. Plus, token consumption with Slack is out of control.
Maybe in time this will be the way we work, but for now I still find myself using GitHub, a terminal, and slack together.
At this point I literally have no idea what modern coding is supposed to look like. I still open my editor, type stuff in and run make. All these tools are released daily and they just fly over my caveman head.
I used to be that person, and suddenly I haven’t opened an editor or written a line of code by hand in 6+ months.
Same here.
All I do now is spend all day on calls with people whose shit exploded and I'm trying to scrub it off the walls, ceiling and the customers.
I feel like theres so much churn and change there's no point in trying to keep up.
That’s fine, and you’re doing fine. In fact, in a few years you will probably be far more skilled than most “software engineers”.
Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct).
Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI?
I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is fine. Stuff still breaks, we fix it. Clients ask "How does XYZ work?" and we say, "Not sure, let us get back to you." And they're totally fine with that answer.
Everything within me screams that this is wrong and we should have intimate familiarity with the system, but I cannot find any evidence that the path of "running a team" instead of "building engineering skill" is not going to work out fine in the long-run. (Yes, my comparison between "team" and "engineering skill" is a bit rough but I'm not interested in the semantics.)
All the evidence that I'm seeing in my own business, with senior engineers meeting clients' needs with autonomous agentic teams is that it's all fine, and while there are gaps, it's actually okay. Clients are happy. Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Bugs are fixed quickly. We ship more in 3 months than we previously could've shipped in a year. I'm baffled and frankly not as advanced as my devs (I still ask questions one by one to my agent, like a Real Caveman!)
It makes me wildly uncomfortable so I'm trying to wrestle with this. I want your statement to be true, but I just don't see evidence of that.
Or unemployed, the jury on that is still out.
Or both?
Every time I'm reminded that Slack is part of Salesforce, I become nostalgic for the good old days
I'm going to chock this one up as a yet-another "X is your agentic coding hub" PR nonsense.
What are people actually using to manage semi-collaborative agentic coding workflows nowadays? We've moved from on-dev-machine coding to @claude in GitHub, but of course GitHub purposefully weakens the capability of that approach to the point that it's kind of a hack. Github/Linear have somewhat more cohesive experiences but it still feels like tooling for agent teaming is quite lacking and unergonomic.
This is probably getting close to the right interface for these things, and that's coming from someone who is religious about using terminals, neovim, etc.
Given that like omnigent and qm already integrate with Slack, it's not a huge surprise that Slack is building agent capabilities directly in.
Personally, I'm getting ecosystem fatigue. Who even has the time to set up pilots to feature-test all these different systems?
SaaS companies have run out of ideas. No one truly needs another coding agent. I weep for SaaS's future.
"I know folk's got their ways of doing things. Live where the low fruit hangs, that's how it is." - Charley Crockett
There's plenty of ideas, they just don't have them [1]. It's kind of hilarious to watch all of these people copy each other out of fear while pretending they're being original.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfHYUFeiJo
Somehow I was hopeful that this would be an announcement about adding syntax highlighted code blocks to Slack messages.
Sounds useful for a PM wanting to spin up a throwaway PoC. But you’d have to rip my IDE from my cold dead hands for any work that extends past the threshold of KTLO.
Hey Slack, how about making workflows less of a pain in the neck to use? In them there is no ability to have branches rejoin to a common path. Worse, an item isn't found in a list it just throws an exception instead of giving me a null item, which oddly I can test for in an if even though it will never happen?
Is this basically trying to do something similar to Zed's https://delta.dev/, but from Slack instead of an IDE?
I'd chime in, but I haven't been deemed important enough to get access to delta yet.
The title got me thinking Slack had open source its code
Slack is fine, but the moment they start bringing that stuff into Jira...
It's already here! https://www.atlassian.com/software/rovo-dev
When we can code in English, now we can code in group chats.
Maybe it’s the future. Where I can join to coding/spec driven channels to observe or help.
I would do this - coding/spec driven in public. Hope it will be the future.
It would allow also non devs to join.
I feel at this point all new AI announcements can be auto generated by AI.
Next up - Slack releases a model router. Cloudflare builds an agents platform. OpenAI acquires a dev tools startup.
But why, it brings literally nothing to the table
They see the entire universe building their own version of Claude Tag and custom internal bots connected to your internal ecosystem, and realizing that they can fight for some enterprise revenue within their own product that everyone else is currently extracting
This is the easiest sell of the century, product can discuss and implement changes without ever getting engineering involved. Or at least that's the theory, I think everyone here can think of a number of reasons to have reservations on this front.
Oh look it's a Buzz clone
https://buzz.xyz/
Coding in slack was not on my bingo card.
A new way to make Slack more annoying
Someone please wake me up from this fever dream
Lean into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY
wish i could use slack again, stuck with teams and the code sharing experience is meh