[yeutterg]

It's not like Slack is even that well-designed anyway. By design, it results in conversation fragmentation, with similar conversations happening all over the place. Once you have more than ~5 employees, people have a hard time keeping up.

My dream work chat app:

1. Conversations happen adjacent to internal documentation, with agents constantly writing and updating the docs based on natural human conversations

2. Create topic threads instead of channels. When you open the topic, agents help you identify similar topics that have already been discussed

3. DMs are essentially banned or strongly discouraged because they contribute to information asymmetry (just spin up a topic and scope it to the relevant people, but only for sensitive discussions)

[doritosfan84]

This is close to a lot of what's happening at Glue. Threads are first-class, so you can start a thread within a group - let's talk about our GraphQL schema and that thread should live in the API Development group. You can also start a thread without a group - just me and another 2 coworkers need to discuss a specific point that would be noisy for everybody else.

Glue AI can be invoked at any time in any context and you can choose whether or not you want to share your conversation with other people after the fact. MCP is also well supported so you get good integration with lots of services like Linear or Notion.

The agent isn't quite as proactive as updating documentation without being prompted right now, but it's regularly done by telling Glue AI to update pages in Notion with info from a thread.

* https://glue.ai

[yeutterg]

Didn't realize Glue was still around! Will take another look.

[OkayPhysicist]

You're overlooking a lot of the utility of DMs for things like "Hey dude, want to grab some lunch at 12:30?"

[aduwah]

Found the manager.

I would go mental without DMs

[yeutterg]

I am a founder of one company and work in sales. Here's where I'm coming from:

As a founder, if everyone is always DMing you, the knowledge is not shared with the team. You become the bottleneck for everything.

In sales, you end up having the #account-[customer] thread and about 4 or 5 DM groups with different internal people on them for each account. Lots of time bringing everyone up to speed when it could be more unified.

Sure, there are sensitive issues like employee conflict, salary discussions, etc. I'm not saying everything needs to be in the public. But I think DMs as they work in Slack cause more issues than they solve.