Comment by krisoft

> my question then is why does Slack exist?

I do not actually believe that you can trivially vibe code a viable slack replacement. But even if one day we could it wouldn’t mean that Slack as a company would just disappear overnight.

They would hang around serving companies who haven’t got the memo yet, or who are locked in a contract, or where the internal political situation is against such a move. The innertia of a bunch of humans behaving like a bunch of humans would provide a sort of “coyote time” effect where the fundamentals could fall out from under Slack yet the company would keep “floating” for a while.

It is funny how much of your question sounds like the old joke where an economist can’t believe their eyes that a $20 bill is laying on the pavement, because surely if it were so someone would have already picked it up. In a steady state the logic might hold up, but we are not in a steady state.

And that is separate from why do I think it is not realistic to just replace slack with vibe coded alternative: just in my company some people use the web interface, some the ios app and some the android app. To be a viable replacement you would need all 3 platforms supported with all features. That sounds in itself a nightmare. Then figuring out what features my company members really use is an other nightmare. There are some who craft custom emojis all the time, some who integrate all kind of weird apps. We various CI and data pipeline processes integrated with slack reporting. And then comes huddle. Video and voice chat and screen sharing. You can even draw on someone else’s screen with it! IT has their needs to archive things (maybe?) or snoop on certain things. Then comes of course interfacing with single-sign-on. I wouldn’t even volunteer to enumerate all the different features people just at my company depend on, let alone offer to replace it.