Comment by xemoka
10 hours ago
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).
If they sell a magic app building machine, its not crazy to ask them build an app with it, is it?
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?
Still better than Slack and Teams.
Of course it is. Making shovels and digging holes are different skills and require different organizations.
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.
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But it's not unreasonable to ask the shovel salesman to show me a hole that model of shovel was used to dig.
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.
Is it really so different than asking the search company back in '01 to make a mail client, a browser, a maps app, ...?
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.
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.
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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
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.
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Was anyone asking them to do that?
Many people now think they should be broken up.
I didn’t ask them. Did you?
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'.
> 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 :(
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.
Wasn't Slack a gaming company that accidentally became a chat company?
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.
No wonder the game failed, they were busy focusing on some internal chat tool
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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.
You're thinking of Discord
No, I'm not. The company that became the Slack corporation was originally a game studio : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History
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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.
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...
General electric did produce locomotives for decades
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...
And modern diesel trains just run a generator to power the electric motors.
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The title is the issue. They're just asking for group chats with Claude
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
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.
And other people as well, at which point they have basically recreated slack.
Slack is more than group chats
Hey they can ask Anthropic, but they are using the wrong channel for asking. The right url for such questions is claude.ai.
It's not crazy, but it is much too soon. Think about GE going from lightbulbs to radios to alarm clock radios.
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.
The model companies are the new OS, you bet they are thinking about projects like this
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.
>> "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.
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.
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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.
> 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
> 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.
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Imagine thinking instant messaging is hard after 30+ years of it...
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.
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.
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.
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> 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
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.
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They are using react for that
Not even joking
Can’t != not prioritizing
that is 1/8 of Slack so it’d be progress :)
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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.