[xemoka]

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).

[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.

[anonyfox]

the sad part is ... its likely true.

[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.

[_heimdall]

You're thinking post-scarcity. We aren't there yet, but one say well have a magic wand, magic shovel, and magic anything else that is currently scarce.

[otabdeveloper4]

You sound like a low-information luddite. Have you tried this week's latest model? You're probably prompting it wrong.

[_heimdall]

Sorry, I don't follow how a sarcastic joke about the claims of post-scarcity would make me a ludite or imply that I am saying models today aren't useful for certain tasks.

[whateveracct]

no it isn't

[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.

[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.

[navane]

People look for something to disagree with, and make posts that "engage". I agree with you and see this a lot, an analogy clearly makes point A but people get hung up on detail B.

[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.

[ethbr1]

> Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.

You know, I've never looked at Valve in that light before.

Once you have a money printing machine, of course any corporate hierarchy becomes antithetical to creativity, because there are huge financial rewards for climbing up. And the primary way you climb up is by turning direct reports to complete tasks you get rewarded for.

Not that Valve doesn't have its own problems.

[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.

[rdtsc]

I didn’t ask them. Did you?

[johnfn]

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'.

[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

[khaosdoctor]

Precise argument here

[lesuorac]

So what you're saying is I should build a game engine first before making my game and then I can pivot into selling game engines?

[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

[mezzode]

Oh wow, TIL that Slack also started like that

[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.

[joemi]

> Its just not a great business on the balance sheet.

I think that's probably what makes it hard.

[darth_avocado]

You can offload the cost of operations to the end user if you’re B2B. Sell the software as licenses the old school way and offload the cost by allowing users to run their own instances either on prem or on cloud.

[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.

[recursive]

> 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".

[throwawaysoxjje]

> I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.

That’s not a valid argument. The company itself would still need to consent.

[echelon]

The company in the very article this thread is about wants this.

Lots of companies want this.

Companies should have the option. Right now they're completely locked out of taking advantage of AI with their business data locked away in Slack.

Slack is a graveyard.

I would be a customer of this. It's a pain in the ass that I can't just ask a question to an LLM about knowledge that I know is locked away in past conversations. I have to go bug that person and sync up with them. Latency, annoying context switches for everyone, ... these things have a simple solution. Let AI have the data.

[troupo]

> 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.

[echelon]

By focusing on AI, you missed the point.

Slack is monopolizing data access and not giving companies access to their own data.

Companies want to hook up their chat BI to LLMs so it can be instantly and richly queried. Slack search sucks, and an LLM could increase employee efficiency by an order of magnitude. It could also make a lot of requests self serve rather than having employees interrupting each other constantly.

Slack is prohibiting companies from surfacing their own data to AI. They're perhaps worried this will erode their leverage.

That's the entire point here.

Companies should have the option to leverage their chat data for AI rather than having no option at all.

Slack bad.

[bandrami]

In general the companies are the ones showing reluctance, much more than their employees. There's still a morass of security, privacy, and legal unanswered questions about LLM use in general. Not to mention the huge unknown of total lifecycle costs

[echelon]

The company writing the article this HN thread is about wants this. Lots of companies do.

Today there is no option because Slack is scared to death of losing their leverage.

Companies want full rights to their data, and Slack is lording over it like a dragon protecting treasure.

[bandrami]

And a whole lot of companies will dump Slack if their data policies loosen (they specifically don't want their people feeding proprietary info to an LLM through any channel)

[ethbr1]

It's amazing how every reply failed to realize you're (and post was) talking about (a) enterprise Slack usage & (b) AI use by the company itself.

[darth_avocado]

I operate with the assumption that the company can access my private DMs on enterprise slack if they want to. With that, users are still allowed to be concerned if the company is going to use that information for AI use cases. I’d prefer that all AI stay away from my private DMs.

[ethbr1]

There is no privacy in corporate computer systems in the US, legally, as far as I'm aware.

Company pays for the bills = company data

The issue here is that Slack's attempting to build a moat by restricting access by a company to that company's data.

Thereby allowing Salesforce to sell additional features on that same data that only it has access to at scale.

[sumedh]

> And Slack costs way too much.

MS Teams is free.

[cush]

The title is the issue. They're just asking for group chats with Claude

[sathish316]

It might be extremely expensive to build Claude into every group chat.

A better option is to have Claude as an assistant or bot in every group chat and triggered when needed. That is just a different interface for Claude or Cowork chat with the group chat context.

Leaving aside the implementation details, the call for action here is valid since Slack is a black hole of your enterprise data and tribal knowledge and Slack is extremely restrictive. Try using Slack MCP in Claude Chat or any AI product

[jinushaun]

But group chat is chat. Even the chat interface with Claude is chat. You can also say the same for any sort of commenting system. Posts and comments, tweets and comments, etc.

I’ve built such system many times. They’re basically all the same, especially if you introduce real time updates. Channels and threads are just organization strategies.

[fragmede]

And other people as well, at which point they have basically recreated slack.

[cush]

Slack is more than group chats

[mietek]

Unfortunately.

[paradox460]

General electric did produce locomotives for decades

[ceejayoz]

And modern diesel trains just run a generator to power the electric motors.

[linkjuice4all]

GE and others also had marketing campaigns that pushed electric appliances [0]. Yes, GE did make consumer appliances but they also made many production and supply components so it was clearly in their interest to promote this new wonder to build demand and a customer base.

It's almost shocking that these AI companies aren't "magicking" up open source replacements for things like Slack, even as just a proof-of-concept. And if not the providers directly, this seems like an easy win for agencies/organizations that build crap to show off "how good they are at AI".

Lastly, where's the one-person start up that's putting Slack, JIRA, and Photoshop out of business? I believe in the value of these tools but there's clearly more progress required before we can type in "replace slack and generate me a million dollars, make no mistakes".

[0] https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medall...

[Ekaros]

Why sell the output single time. When you can sell the tool that makes output to nearly unlimited times. Competing with your own customers is bad move as it limits number of those hopeful fools.

[amelius]

Hey they can ask Anthropic, but they are using the wrong channel for asking. The right url for such questions is claude.ai.

[joshAg]

It's not crazy at all. That's what conglomerates do. GE literally built trains and electricity until 2021 when the train unit got spun off.

[1970-01-01]

It's not crazy, but it is much too soon. Think about GE going from lightbulbs to radios to alarm clock radios.

[paulsutter]

The model companies are the new OS, you bet they are thinking about projects like this

[khaosdoctor]

I mean, the idea itself (of having <insert your AI minion here> inside Slack) has crossed my mind multiple times, and I have successfully extract some data using AI from it and it's actually really useful.

But I agree, having Anthropic building this is like having DJI building planes because they know how to create things that fly.

[wakawaka28]

Imagine thinking instant messaging is hard after 30+ years of it...

[j45]

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.

[troupo]

> Claude Code could absolutely build a chat client in the hands of someone who could also build the rest around it.

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

[senko]

That's still light years better than Slack.

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.

[quesera]

Something important must be different about our Slack environments. Maybe it's the number of users, or possibly the OS?

We're a small company (about 150 Slack users), and I've run the Slack (Electron) app on a 16GB M2 (macOS) and a 4GB Chromebook (running a non-ChromeOS Linux), and it has never had any noteworthy performance issues.

It still sucks, but not because of performance.

[troupo]

How is it "light years better than Slack"?

It's a terminal wrapper for Anthropic API. It somehow baloons to 68 gigabytes when all it needs to do is call an APi and slowly draw a few hundred characters on screen. And they can't even do that without flickering. Oh yes, and until very recently it would also consume a significant percentage of CPU just waiting for input to a slash command.

Yes, on that same 20 core 128g RAM machine.

You surely must be kidding. Slack is an amazing cutting edge high performance tech in comparison as it has about two orders of magnitude more features that a TUI API wrapper.

[theshackleford]

your instance does that. Mine does no such thing and I don’t know anyone for whom it does.

Not to say it doesn’t, but it’s clearly not a universal issue.

[paradox460]

They are using react for that

Not even joking

[brookst]

Can’t != not prioritizing

[troupo]

No. They literally can't.

E.g. they claim it's a difficult task to render a few hundred characters on screen, and that their CLI wrapper is a tiny game engine: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

They literally had to buy bun to have someone who understands how things work to fix this

[bdangubic]

that is 1/8 of Slack so it’d be progress :)

[troupo]

Slack doesn't require nearly as much to run. And Slack has about two orders of magnitude more functionality

[bensyverson]

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]

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.

[bensyverson]

I hear you, but it's not like the quality bar on Github was super high before AI

[monsieurbanana]

It might not have been. But it's not hard to see that whatever productivity coefficient multiplier llms brings, it's being dwarfed by how much easier it is to publish projects that only look good on the surface.

While it's a great tool in the hands of capable and well intentioned people, there's not a world out there where the average quality of software goes up.

[j45]

Underrated comment.

Even if AI with autonomous agentic development made something that worked at the average of code quality, I wonder if the code might be a little more sturdy, predictable, and the compromise is a little more verbose for the level that works for the AI to manage it.

Humans would then help oversee the input, insight, and extension and improvement above and below that.

AI could be a baseline.

[just-the-wrk]

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.