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by holografix 38 days ago
Wowza this will be a token guzzler. Assuming Claude is parsing every message posted on multiple slack channels, compacting knowledge etc.

Looks like Anthropic is progressing further into platform territory and conquering Agentic use cases left right and centre. If you’re building an agent platform for workforce productivity today, your best best is model agnosticism and focus on token cost control.

5 comments

Token consumption on this is not a huge issue, I built this a few months ago for our company slack using claude agent sdk and most of the conversations/sessions were short lived. You don't generally tend to have long sessions with agents in Slack like you would if using in the terminal.

It was very useful to delegate things like create a ticket based on a discussion to Claude.

> You don't generally tend to have long sessions with agents in Slack like you would if using in the terminal.

You have to check the announcement fineprint. As long as they advertise it as proactive it needs to keep up to date with all the ongoing discussions. And I believe that means all group messages. Wouldn't that make sense?

From the announcement

> follows along with its channel, it builds more context about the work

> And Claude can even automatically learn from other Slack channels and data sources, if it’s granted permission.

And the additional "ambient" mode also seems to imply that it will work by itself in background tasks to check (I assume) in some scheduled fashion what stale topics it needs to reengage.

It means it'll use tool calls to search slack and get context not that it's some sort of ambient always running loop.
They do have an ambient mode you can enable.
i have a claude-agent-sdk slack bot i built for work; it offers proactive interaction as well but it uses a deterministic filter and then a haiku pass for messages that pass the filter... negligible token cost.
Fundamentally, Anthropic is a token merchant (it is higher quality than other models, but still token merchant), so it will find any excuse to make you spend more tokens, and not even try too hard to help you save on tokens.

The whole ‘inline visualization’ thing is another great example. You want to know about this new concept on Claude? Why don’t I generate this new ‘inline visualization’ for you to learn it even if it doesn’t significantly help you at all…

It feels like a lot like mobile telecom providers, trying desperately not to become commoditised by trying to value-add up the chain. Those guys mostly just ended up annoying consumers by creating walled gardens and preinstalled apps, let's hope this plays out better.
> With the launch of Claude Tag, we're issuing a one-time Claude Tag usage credit to eligible organizations - $25000 per Claude Enterprise organization and $2500 per Claude Team organization with at least 10 paid seats.

That’s… a lot of credits. Clearly they expect to make it back fast.

That's exactly what I'm doing. Push for model flexibility, cost control, and reliability.

The moat is to be anti lock in. The open source model needs to be amped up on steroids to avoid this permiating every facet of your org you cannot escape.

Good luck. Anthropic gets to co-train their harness with their model. Can't see people competing with that unless they own the model.