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xemoka
jayd16
If they sell a magic app building machine, its not crazy to ask them build an app with it, is it?
vdfs
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?
Mistletoe
Still better than Slack and Teams.
sonofhans
Of course it is. Making shovels and digging holes are different skills and require different organizations.
gzread
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.
bandrami
But it's not unreasonable to ask the shovel salesman to show me a hole that model of shovel was used to dig.
cyanydeez
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.
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Rebelgecko
Why do that when they can sell you a shovel to do it yourself?
vrighter
why don't you buy a subscription and ask the magic machine yourself.... You just need to take out your credit card....
johnfn
Is it really so different than asking the search company back in '01 to make a mail client, a browser, a maps app, ...?
xemoka
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
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.
cmrdporcupine
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.
doctorpangloss
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
furyofantares
Was anyone asking them to do that?
Many people now think they should be broken up.
troupo
1. No one asked them.
2. Half (or more) of those things they bought.
ninjha
> matrix would be everywhere
now i know the bar is 1000 feet below the earth with teams but matrix is still only maybe a foot or two above the surface
i really want to like it but every few months i try it and it’s clearly just not ready :(
debo_
Wasn't Slack a gaming company that accidentally became a chat company?
gspetr
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.
xyzsparetimexyz
No wonder the game failed, they were busy focusing on some internal chat tool
aaronbrethorst
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.
mezzode
You're thinking of Discord
debo_
No, I'm not. The company that became the Slack corporation was originally a game studio : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History
uxp100
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
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...
KronisLV
> 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).
sathish316
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.
troupo
> 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
echelon
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
>> "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.
hunterpayne
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.
nkrisc
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
> 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
> 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.
sumedh
> And Slack costs way too much.
MS Teams is free.
godelski
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
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.
godelski
It really sounds like you're asking for something else. More like multiple people to be able to talk to the same instance. Which that's a very different thing than Slack
a3w
They seem to not want a messenger, they want a multiuser-first prompt.
j45
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.
godelski
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...
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jinushaun
Did you read the article? It’s not a crazy ask. They want multi-user Claude sessions. But what stops the humans from talking to each other? Boom! You suddenly have Slack.
gentleman11
Just use mattermost. We alrrady have an open source wlack replqcement.
KaiserPro
> 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
NewJazz
Slack isn't either? And matrix is just a protocol ... Maybe a fun client can be built on top of it, eh?
godelski
Cool. And?
Those were examples, not answers. Those examples aren't exactly compatible with one another (though bridges exist, but you can bridge anything).
sp1nningaway
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
It's a retread of another (also baffling) "Why OpenAI Should Build Slack" post from a popular AI Substack.
Just more empty grist for the AI adjacent content mill. "Slack sucks" doesn't let you draft off the current hype zeitgest, so we get "content" like this.
https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...
nitwit005
A large portion of the AI related response pieces fail to reference what they're responding to. I have to assume it's a side effect of how they're using AI to write them.
Jaysobel
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
khaosdoctor
I didn't even know this company before this article
andrenotgiant
sounds like it was good marketing
georgewfraser
I assure you I wrote it myself
dbt00
"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
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
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.
3eb7988a1663
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.
kccqzy
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.
riwsky
cries in google wave
hunterpayne
+1, google wave might have been the best thing Google ever made.
andoando
There was a guy here plugging his slack alternative that was heavily AI based and people here loved it. I don't remember the name unfortunately
julienreszka
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
anonymouscaller
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
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
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
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
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.
ares623
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.
abujazar
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
No they wouldn't have Nobody will write this, AI will write the entire thing. You don't need many people to maintain it
bandrami
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
matharmin
What features are you using that the $18/user/month plan doesn't cover?
mgraczyk
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
apublicfrog
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.
EdNutting
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.
crabmusket
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.
flyrain
Zulip is not even close to Slack. It keeps crashing.
tabbott
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.
jesse__
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
flyrain
Thanks for sharing the channel. I was using Zulip 1 year ago in my MacOS. It crashes every a few days. Later we give it up and switch to something else. I could submit issue next time I use it. I don't know when though.
nicoburns
I've been using a couple of different Zulip servers for professional communication for several years and haven't had any issues.
gitaarik
Have used it for years without any problems. Not much recently though, but can't imagine they suddenly became unstable.
ilsubyeega
FWIW, Zulip is in GSoC this year, so whoever interested in here, i encourage to participate it yea
EdNutting
Sounds like something Claude could fix… /s
bandrami
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
Esophagus4
Combined with the fact that I actually don’t even hate Slack…
therealdrag0
Ya slack is great. What’s the problem.
wmeredith
Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
morkalork
That hasn't stopped Google from building chat features into their apps a dozen or so times
oasisbob
> 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.
Esophagus4
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.
willbur1230
they dont let you extract messages via the API. Keeping Slack message data in their walled garden
ahussain
Doesn't the conversation.history permission let a Slack bot extract all messages? https://docs.slack.dev/reference/methods/conversations.histo...
sometdog
Last May they introduced a new rate limit for that endpoint of 1 request per minute.
sadeshmukh
You can do workspace wide data export
apublicfrog
> 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.
malchow
For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/
Robdel12
Ha, I’ve had a Mattermost instance for years until they handicapped the most recent version by limiting the number of messages on the self hosted version.
I ended up building my own alternative and was going to OSS it but like… there’s already a bunch out there.
Anyway, Mattermost might not be the choice these days. With that stunt I was annoyed enough to spend a weekend to replace what they were to me.
pcthrowaway
> 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?
trjordan
A similar argument to OpenAI: https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-why-openai-should-build-sl...
hungryhobbit
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
Considering their Palantir partnership, I'm not sure I'd touch an Anthropic-designed slack either.
georgewfraser
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
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.
sanex
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.
gamerson
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.
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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).