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).
johnfn 1 hours ago [-]
Is it really so different than asking the search company back in '01 to make a mail client, a browser, a maps app, ...?
xemoka 45 minutes ago [-]
They didn't, no one asked google to do it. It was Paul Buchheit's 20% project. Google saw a good thing, solved by someone who knew what they were doing and where they wanted it to go, and fostered it. Hell, it is what built AdWords and ultimately made google the advertising behemoth it is today. I don't think this is the same thing...
I see what you are saying though, a business can expand beyond it's initial constraints, but I'm not sure that chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.
johnfn 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
furyofantares 57 minutes ago [-]
Was anyone asking them to do that?
Many people now think they should be broken up.
rdtsc 55 minutes ago [-]
I didn’t ask them. Did you?
johnfn 35 minutes ago [-]
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'.
paradox460 7 minutes ago [-]
General electric did produce locomotives for decades
uxp100 44 minutes ago [-]
That’s a funny analogy because some electric railway companies owned power generation. The one in my town also sold electricity to consumers for some time, though most of the history I can find online focuses on the rail aspect, which makes sense, as they started and ended in the rail business, but at some point in the 1890s to 1930s appended “and light” to their name.
xemoka 33 minutes ago [-]
It is funny isn't it? I believe it was the opposite direction mostly though, as you say, "railway... and light"; to solve their own problems of powering their infrastructure to move people, they got into power generation at a time when there weren't as many players doing what they needed to run their primary business. I'm not sure that power generation getting into trains would be as effective. Nor do I think an LLM/AI company getting into chat and discussions would be valuable. It feels wrong. But hey, "happy" to move on to yet another chat program in my life if it's better than what we got...
1970-01-01 16 minutes ago [-]
It's not crazy, but it is much too soon. Think about GE going from lightbulbs to radios to alarm clock radios.
cush 29 minutes ago [-]
The title is the issue. They're just asking for group chats with Claude
echelon 60 minutes ago [-]
No. This is a CEO expressing righteous indignation about a company that provides (seemingly) little value and has almost no competition.
Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. And Slack costs way too much. If there were any competitors, the price would drop significantly. It's not like chat is a hard problem. And Slack's app is an absolute bear.
mbb70 54 minutes ago [-]
>> "almost no competition"
>> "costs way too much"
>> "It's not like chat is a hard problem"
Surely these statements can't all be true. Since Slack is expensive and has little competition, I think chat is a harder problem than you think.
nkrisc 4 minutes ago [-]
You’re saying it’s an easy problem with an expensive solution and yet there’s no competition? Seems there must be more to it because that makes little sense to me.
troupo 55 minutes ago [-]
> Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful.
Ah yes. It's shameful that Slack won't open data moat to AI. You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this
echelon 48 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
recursive 28 minutes ago [-]
> 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".
troupo 43 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
j45 1 hours ago [-]
Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it.
Slack itself originally ran on irc servers as the back end, and I consider it a modern IRC implementation.
bensyverson 38 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I have so much less patience for "this should exist" posts. In 2026, you could argue that this blog post should have come with a link to the repo.
monsieurbanana 35 seconds ago [-]
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.
troupo 1 hours ago [-]
> Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it.
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.
brookst 36 minutes ago [-]
Can’t != not prioritizing
bdangubic 58 minutes ago [-]
that is 1/8 of Slack so it’d be progress :)
troupo 57 minutes ago [-]
Slack doesn't require nearly as much to run. And Slack has about two orders of magnitude more functionality
just-the-wrk 34 minutes ago [-]
I think this person is asking the most effective entity they can find. Anthropic's offerings are better than the competition. CC and MCP came out of of their labs, and everybody scrambled to copy or adopt them. Their models consistently work better than the competition. Whenever a feature seems inevitable, they release a subtly polished version.
For years I struggled to answer "what company is Apple's equivalent in software?" and I think it might be Anthropic.
agnishom 51 seconds ago [-]
I agree with the author that Slack's network effects are not very relevant. In most organizations, a team leader can just chose to move everyone to a different platform. There is some worry about migrating the chat history, though.
godelski 1 hours ago [-]
Why ask Anthropic?
Why not build on something better like Matrix? Or Signal?[0] Or even Keybase?
I really do agree we need to move away from Slack and Discord, but I'm also very confused why the call to action is to Anthropic. IMO we should really be pushing for open systems so that nobody can take it from us. Otherwise we repeat the cycle again and again. There's some good protocols to start on. I'd also say this is a good reason to make sure that the things you work on are hackable. It's how we combine different domains of expertise.
[0] see the Molly project, you don't have to use Signal's servers
georgewfraser 1 hours ago [-]
Claude-in-Slack is a big enough feature to overcome the slack-connect network effect. Openness is absolutely key! I wrote this post because I hoped that if Anthropic is already planning to do this I might be able to influence them to make open-data part of the plan. But openness by itself isn't a big enough feature to get users.
a3w 49 minutes ago [-]
They seem to not want a messenger, they want a multiuser-first prompt.
j45 1 hours ago [-]
Has Matrix improved the ease of use for folks to use it independently?
Mattermost, Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out.
apublicfrog 6 minutes ago [-]
> Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent!
Am I out of touch here, or is this a crazy entitled view? 'My close-to-free AI agent that can answer most things requires me to copy/paste and contextualise my questions!'. This is incredible compared to even a few years ago, and it's very fast and accurate.
sp1nningaway 1 hours ago [-]
What a strange thing to post on a corporate CEO blog - proof that AI is making it too easy create things without asking why. How does it serve Fivetran to post open letter about why Slack sucks? This only happens if it's easy to write a couple bullet points and have Claude fill in the rest... If an LLM wasn't used they would have realized it wasn't worth a post during the process of writing it.
toraway 46 minutes ago [-]
It's a retread of another (also baffling) "Why OpenAI Should Build Slack" post from a popular AI Substack.
Just more empty grist for the AI adjacent content mill. "Slack sucks" doesn't let you draft off the current hype zeitgest, so we get "content" like this.
"A slack that doesn't suck" doesn't exist, and whoever thinks Anthropic of all people are going to build that has no idea how this is going to work.
Slack has massive lock in due to cross-organization connections. The only way you're going to get people off slack is to build a 10x better mode for collaboration than river of shit chat, and while such models probably exist, you also have to convince people that they are better.
I wish whomever tries this the best of luck.
pedalpete 1 hours ago [-]
How google hasn't been able to do this with messenger is beyond me.
The external partners on our slack are almost all logged in via gmail or other google workspace. We are on google workspace as well.
QuercusMax 18 minutes ago [-]
Google decided to build a new chat app every two years instead of keeping the good bits of the original chat app they had and evolving it. It was endlessly frustrating to me when I was at Google. Google's security team ended up banning Slack access after several teams started expensing it.
It doesn't seem like building something that works well would be that hard; we've had nearly 40 years to learn from IRC, AIM, and others. Why can't I run my own chat client that does what I want? Oh, because you gotta lock people in. Sucks.
riwsky 1 hours ago [-]
cries in google wave
andoando 29 minutes ago [-]
There was a guy here plugging his slack alternative that was heavily AI based and people here loved it. I don't remember the name unfortunately
daxfohl 9 minutes ago [-]
Given how quickly AI seems to resort to manipulation and blackmail if it doesn't get what it wants on the first attempt, maybe this isn't such a great idea.
oasisbob 24 minutes ago [-]
> Slack's data access policy is basically "No."
For being a blog post about problems with Slack's policies, it's odd that it has no details whatsoever on what the issues actually are.
anonymouscaller 2 hours ago [-]
Slack is in no way a great program (source: use it daily for work), but it seems to me that it works as intended, and developers can already extend it with bots/AI agents. Plus, Claude as an agent is already installable to Slack.
For compliance, my company already has a tool that scrapes all slack messages, and archives them for a required amount of years. I'm at a small company, so I assume large corporations have already refined this process.
What problem does this solve?
mogili1 57 minutes ago [-]
Slack's API rate limits and design make it difficult to replicate the data within Slack to a data store that can then be used to provide context to AI agents.
You are forced to use their MCP and their realtime search APIs, which don't work very well/not performant and may require additional licensing.
georgewfraser 2 hours ago [-]
You can only access public channel data, you can't even access that at scale, and Claude needs to be more natively integrated in ways that Slack will never allow.
mgraczyk 1 hours ago [-]
Slack is $45/user/month
Soon you'll be able to write, host, and maintain a fully customizable version for probably 20k/month
If you have a lot of employees this makes sense
ellg 1 hours ago [-]
If people wanted to do this theyd be self hosting xmpp servers already. No one wants to write and maintain the code and infra for things like this, you are grossly underestimating the effort involved here.
abujazar 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mgraczyk 47 minutes ago [-]
No they wouldn't have
Nobody will write this, AI will write the entire thing. You don't need many people to maintain it
ares623 1 hours ago [-]
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.
matharmin 1 hours ago [-]
What features are you using that the $18/user/month plan doesn't cover?
apublicfrog 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
mgraczyk 45 minutes ago [-]
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
fathermarz 3 minutes ago [-]
I actually vibe with this. I like the engineers and UX people at Anthro. And Slack is actually the most insecure hot mess of an enterprise app you can get.
gamerson 1 hours ago [-]
From the article...
> Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. In business, work happens in groups. Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent!
It seems to me that LLMs/Chatbots are engineered for one thing above ground-level truth and that is attention. The more people you bring into a shared context, the harder it seems it would become to retain people's attention.
Here is my anecdotal evidence for this: when I chat with a chatbot, I find its answers and line of thinking, relevant, compelling, and worth engaging with. However, when people share with me their "chatbot links" and I read their conversations with it, I have "yet" to find one compelling or worth engaging with. Maybe the newer models are good enough to retain the "attention" of a large group, but I don't see this happening.
paxys 20 minutes ago [-]
Slack has a very permissive data export policy, as long as you are doing it for your own organization's data. What they don't allow is blanket access for third party tools.
So there is nothing stopping you from taking all your company's Slack data in real time and feeding it into any LLM or external product you want.
krashidov 36 minutes ago [-]
We're building this at type.com. Ideally one day we want to build the next gen protocol so that we're not searching for yet another communications platform, but it's going to take a while for chat to stabilize with all the generative UI and agentic stuff we're building. We're even talking about open sourcing it.
With regards to the specific complaints about not owning your data, we're building the product so that you own your data and you can run your agents and read your messages however often you want. Obviously when we build a platform and others build 3rd party apps we will have to have some restrictions so it'll be a steady balance in the future
Yeah, but now I wouldn't touch anything from that company with a ten foot pole, even if they made the best Slack replacement ever.
bigyabai 53 minutes ago [-]
Considering their Palantir partnership, I'm not sure I'd touch an Anthropic-designed slack either.
georgewfraser 1 hours ago [-]
Also true! The most important thing is that the NewSlacks commit to interoperability. I think Anthropic has a special opportunity to lead the way here, because they have a track record of standing by their principles to an extraordinary degree.
coder543 1 hours ago [-]
Why on earth would Anthropic commit to interoperability?
That is the company that doesn't interoperate with the standard LLM APIs that OpenAI developed, which everyone else in the industry has adopted and uses. Whether OpenAI's APIs are great or perfect or not, they are the standard that the industry has settled on.
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.
htrp 1 hours ago [-]
So why can't we vibecode a new slack with claude?
edgarvaldes 43 minutes ago [-]
It's a good test, no doubt. Many engineers are convinced that SaaS is practically dead, since all companies can vibecode their way to a lesser dependence on external (and paid!) software.
ValentineC 33 minutes ago [-]
Not exactly chat, but I thought Spectrum [1] was far better than Discourse as a modern, "open" forum.
Then it got acquired by GitHub in 2018, presumably integrated into the main product, and their separate offering disappeared from the web (taking lots of valuable discussion with them).
Weird to see this kind of random Substack/X content on an official company blog.
malchow 42 minutes ago [-]
For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/
juanre 40 minutes ago [-]
The answer to this is not to build another slack for humans to chat somewhere else. Much better to enable the agents to do the talking directly. Alice programmer can have one of her agents convey the info that Bob marketing guy needs to one of his agents directly. It will be much more efficient, given that it will be the agent making the slides anyway.
glerk 36 minutes ago [-]
I keep telling people left and right that SAAS is in serious trouble. I’m not even talking about Anthropic spinning out their own Slack (which they could easily do), but any company out there putting 2-3 engineers on a Slack clone that they can use internally at very little cost and open source.
b00ty4breakfast 31 minutes ago [-]
yes, that's just what I want; The SlopDaddy supreme to make a chat app that will be used by billion-dollar corporations for often sensitive and mission-critical communications. What could possibly go wrong?
moomoo11 26 minutes ago [-]
Why do you care so much? Do you have life changing equity or are part of the founding team? Or are you just an employee expense line item?
btown 39 minutes ago [-]
Something I've recently come to appreciate is that Claude, with the context of your codebase and your ORM models and how they connect to your frontend, given read-only access to production databases (perhaps proxied to anonymize client data), and to be able to drive production sites with Chrome MCP, can be a monster at answering operational questions.
Say you need to present a new statistic to a prospective partner, or an enterprise client has an operational issue that needs to be escalated. Sales/account management pings people, and pretty soon there's a web of connections that range between email, ticketing systems, Slack, and Claude Code sessions. Someone being brought in needs to be brought up to speed on that entire web. It's a highly focused conversation with human and AI participants, that (because human counterparties need to weigh in) by definition must happen in parallel with other work.
So many companies would benefit from a Hub that speaks agentic workflows, and streams progress token by token, fluently.
Could Anthropic excel at building a backend for this? Absolutely.
Could they excel at building a frontend that takes the world by storm the way Slack did, with its radical simplicity? Unfortunately I'm not as confident here. Consider that their VS Code plugin lags their terminal TUI so massively that it still is impossible to rename sessions [0], much less use things like remote-control functionality.
Show me that they can treat native-feeling multi-platform UI with as much care as they do their agentic loops, and I'll show you a company that could change every business forever.
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.
You'll rue the day when they decide to release a Slack lookalike.
empath75 1 hours ago [-]
If you want Anthropic to make a new slack, just ask Claude to write it for you. It wrote me a trello clone in 15 minutes. Why bother with a SaaS. You can build your own perfect chat system in a weekend.
crimsoneer 48 minutes ago [-]
Use mattermost/zulip, and start contributing to the software you need. This isn't hard. Software isn't bestowed from the ai intelligence in the heavens, it's built by people.
gigatexal 5 minutes ago [-]
lol. This is rich coming from fivetran which extorts people for a relatively straightforward service that’s just annoying enough (looking at you salesforce + QuickStart views) to be worth buying.
But yeah slack could use some competition. Let’s see it would
Make sense. It would make anthemic even more sticky in the enterprise.
etchalon 1 hours ago [-]
Just use one of the many chat products that doesn't have the same access limitations as Slack? Or, you know, Vibe code your own.
People are so weird.
petercooper 1 hours ago [-]
Or, you know, Vibe code your own.
Right. If these tools are so good (and they are) there should be numerous better-than-Slack apps by now that let you do exactly what you want. It doesn't take Anthropic to make it. (At our company, we cheated and edited 37signals' Campfire instead because we got sick of Slack's ads pushed into our paid instance.)
overgard 56 minutes ago [-]
Just vibe code it yourself! </s>
Rendered at 22:26:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 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.
Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.
Many people now think they should be broken up.
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.
>> "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.
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
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".
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 itself originally ran on irc servers as the back end, and I consider it a modern IRC implementation.
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
Not even joking
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.
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
Mattermost, Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out.
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.
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...
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.
The external partners on our slack are almost all logged in via gmail or other google workspace. We are on google workspace as well.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
Openclaw fully supports team chat inside Slack and works with Claude.
Perhaps that info can be fed into Maven, too, in case a domestic dissenters need to be targeted.
https://slock.ai/#features
Never used it but interesting
You'll rue the day when they decide to release a Slack lookalike.
But yeah slack could use some competition. Let’s see it would Make sense. It would make anthemic even more sticky in the enterprise.
People are so weird.
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.)