Slack Code

(salesforce.com)

41 points | by trollied 1 hour ago

27 comments

  • arscan 43 minutes ago
    > 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.

    • ghm2199 27 minutes ago
      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.

    • abtinf 23 minutes ago
      Every sentence on that page reads as slop.
  • sph 42 minutes ago
    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.
    • paxys 39 minutes ago
      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.
      • cavem0nkey 33 minutes ago
        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.

        • baal80spam 11 minutes ago
          Ah, so then you became a plumber!
        • toomuchtodo 11 minutes ago
          All money is green. Ensure you are being compensated sufficiently for your time.
    • tayo42 30 minutes ago
      I feel like theres so much churn and change there's no point in trying to keep up.
      • lbreakjai 21 minutes ago
        Remember six months ago when linkedin people were adamant you needed to keep on top of everything not to get "left behind"? Agents, skills, mcps, swarms ...

        If anything, my setup has gotten ever so simpler as models got better.

    • skywhopper 36 minutes ago
      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”.
      • johnsmith1840 18 minutes ago
        I dunno dude, it's getting scary fast. You tried a fable/5.6sol maximum effort on a chunky task yet?

        Maybe in a few years being a good coder will be like being a good taxi driver with self driving. You know the best spots and the ai can't drive the most unusual roads but effectively 95% of all driving is self driving.

      • dewey 29 minutes ago
        Or unemployed, the jury on that is still out.
      • adamtaylor_13 30 minutes ago
        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.

        • miyoji 14 minutes ago
          > Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should.

          Either you work in a non-standard field, or your standards for software are way too low.

          What software gets to fail 80% of the time? If your ecommerce checkout software fails 1 in 5 times, you don't have an ecommerce business at all, you are dead in the water. If your airline booking software fails for 1 in 5 customers, you are out of business.

          99.99% reliability still means 1 in 10000 customers are experiencing an error, which at scale can mean thousands to millions per day. That's completely unacceptable for any software I've ever been involved with writing.

          • adamtaylor_13 0 minutes ago
            I think you might be taking that number a bit too literally. What I mean is, it works enough that no one is complaining. But, all software has bugs. Some are logic/syntax bugs, and some are intent. "It should do this, but actually does that."

            The sum of ALL of these classes of bugs is such that our clients haven't complained about the software being particularly faulty. It's impossible to tell if it's more or less buggy than it would've been written entirely by hand, but I suspect it's less buggy than it would be if written by hand.

  • drfritznunkie 21 minutes ago
    Oh great, I look forward to our next Slack renewal when they foist another 125% licensing increase on us for yet another AI add-on we don't want. This year, they decided that our Enterprise plan wasn't paying for another floor on Benhioff's tower fast enough and so forced an 125% license increase. They then played the game of "if you renew early, we're going to cut you a special one-time deal because we're feeling generous and allow you to renew at a slightly discounted rate, subject to the approval of our deal desk, of course ". barf.
  • abixb 42 minutes ago
    SaaS companies have run out of ideas. No one truly needs another coding agent. I weep for SaaS's future.
    • username_my1 5 minutes ago
      The amazing thing is that there is almost always an open-source alternative that is 10x better in many ways, in the case of slack https://mattermost.com/

      I'm looking forward for AI to make it very easy to deploy your own tools and walk away from all this SAAS.

      slack, jira, notion, even google suite

      AI makes the cost of software development much lower, which means you can have a very good alternative that you can self host.

      I'm thinking of companies that has 1000+ employees that pay millions annually in SaaS subscriptions.

      SaaS is a tax on b2c business that will be reduced.

    • rglover 36 minutes ago
      "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

    • shortstuffsushi 16 minutes ago
      This is how software trends go. AI has already had several of these; it started with every site needing their own chatbot powered by AI. A decade ago, every product was trying to integrate some sort of blockchain. It takes time for them to shake out to where they actually belong.
    • cavem0nkey 23 minutes ago
      SaaS companies never had any ideas in the first place past turning a one off software cost into a monthly one and making you an addict of their crack supply. The coding agent just puts them between you and getting shit done again so they can monetize it. Milk you dry.

      Seriously just fuck the whole industry and walk away! Go back to emailing spreadsheets and documents around. Save your shit to your own hard disk. You don't need a todo app - just post-its stuck to your fucking monitor. Call someone on the fucking phone. Crack your software or use OSS. Run it all on recycled PCs. Stop giving everyone money for this shit because it's only normalising your subscription future.

      Note: I work for a SaaS company. They are bastards. They all are.

    • altmanaltman 16 minutes ago
      Like they say this is a new way of coding, anyone can build ANYTHING and they chose to make another Claude Code and presents it like its an original invention
  • ericpauley 31 minutes ago
    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.

    • ramoz 19 minutes ago
      Why did you move from on-dev-machine coding to @claude in GitHub if it's a weaker capability?

      Im not convinced of any of these cloud or tagging solutions where I get to the point of moving coding away from my dev's machines.

  • vehemenz 44 minutes ago
    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?

  • jez 52 minutes ago
    Somehow I was hopeful that this would be an announcement about adding syntax highlighted code blocks to Slack messages.
  • ZeroCool2u 26 minutes ago
    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.

    • notpushkin 22 minutes ago
      GitHub has bigger problems at hand. The uptime won’t plummet by itself!
    • altmanaltman 18 minutes ago
      God Teams + Github would be a hell within a hell
  • neuronexmachina 44 minutes ago
    Is this basically trying to do something similar to Zed's https://delta.dev/, but from Slack instead of an IDE?
    • vehemenz 28 minutes ago
      I'd chime in, but I haven't been deemed important enough to get access to delta yet.
  • syntheticnature 38 minutes ago
    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?
  • Retr0id 23 minutes ago
    Looks like a great way to replicate the setup of "four guys standing around watching one guy do the work" but the one guy is Claude now.
  • wolttam 28 minutes ago
    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.
  • lasisdabomb 31 minutes ago
    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.
  • swiftcoder 27 minutes ago
    Every time I'm reminded that Slack is part of Salesforce, I become nostalgic for the good old days
  • ashton314 46 minutes ago
    Someone please wake me up from this fever dream
  • lapkaaaa 50 minutes ago
    But why, it brings literally nothing to the table
    • gk1 18 minutes ago
      Slack wants to be primary place people do their work. And they're almost there... It's certainly where you "work" (communicate) with people, it's where many engage with and/or control other platform like project trackers, and it's increasingly the place you interact with whatever AI agents your company uses. It makes perfect send they want to bring the coding agent into the fold (into their UI) as well. And, given Anthropic's release of Claude Tag, they're probably not wrong about that.
    • jakevoytko 41 minutes ago
      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
    • Etheryte 42 minutes ago
      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.
  • jdlyga 34 minutes ago
    Slack is fine, but the moment they start bringing that stuff into Jira...
  • hmokiguess 29 minutes ago
    The title got me thinking Slack had open source its code
  • krudnicki 35 minutes ago
    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.

  • sidcool 40 minutes ago
    Coding in slack was not on my bingo card.
  • paxys 33 minutes ago
    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.

  • theflyingelvis 43 minutes ago
    A new way to make Slack more annoying
  • noodletheworld 21 minutes ago
    What even is this feature?

    You can’t just “spin Claude up in slack”; it can’t magically just connect to GitHub and your code.

    I presume this feature basically is like… if you’re already using your agents in cloud hosted runtimes, then you can connect to those agents like you already are, but via slack.

    Did I misunderstand?

    This seems like a non feature; if you’re bring to want it, you can’t have it because you have to setup Complicated External System, and if you’re already using cloud hosted agents, you’re already using it (eg. Claude tag or whatever).

    So it’s what… a diff viewer in slack? An agents tab so slack becomes like cursor?

    The videos seem enormously light on examples of how it actually works, did someone find a more detailed example of usage to show why you want this?

  • fHr 43 minutes ago
    wish i could use slack again, stuck with teams and the code sharing experience is meh
  • jonstaab 36 minutes ago
    Oh look it's a Buzz clone

    https://buzz.xyz/