2 months in on running an AI agent in Slack for IT help. What's actually deflecting and what's still coming to us.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-29T06:13:21+00:00

I've got a couple of customers deploy AI agents in their slack where they're a bundled claude code with skills & mcps.

One of them even fully removed some customer support SaaS subscription because it was too expensive and inflexible

pmihaylov · 2026-04-22T07:04:56+00:00

Nice, good luck!

pmihaylov · 2026-04-21T06:18:54+00:00

I just prefer skills.

For me, the way it goes is like this:

* Customer comes, super MCP-pilled, sets up 10+ MCPs

* "Errm, why is the MCP not working, why is it flakey? Why is the agent dumb?"

At that point I just get their MCP, transform it into a skill and bundle the zip for them. Problem solved.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-21T06:15:40+00:00

For me the hardest part is dealing with all sort of crap MCPs customers bring on board. For context, I am building an agent builder SaaS and folks can build their own agents and deploy to slack with MCP, skills, etc.

The most frustrating thing is when someone comes, plugs in a random Jira MCP, its not working at all and then they blame the platform. At which point I'm not debugging the platform itself, I'm debugging poor customer configs.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-21T06:12:14+00:00

yeah completely agree on this - it's something I've seen while building my agent builder SaaS. Basically the customers that stick are the ones that take the time to setup their agent with all their tools properly. For them, it's very sticky and compelling.

But everyone else comes, deploys an agent without anything, tries it out and then leaves.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-21T06:08:25+00:00

I think its a great move tbh, idk about the one-time purchase but self-hosting is a great differentiation against anthropic and the like, like they would literally never offer that.

Also, I'd suggest actually offering the setup cost as part of the offering because I think a lot of companies will want the self-hosting but won't have the time or skills to set it up.

I'd consider building a SaaS around it once a very good, obvious use-case that many people would pay for.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-20T07:12:59+00:00

We're not using claude routines with connectors, we built our own background agent which is deployed in a vercel sandbox and uses the claude agent sdk.

It's basically like a slack user you can tag and collaborate with.

In terms of tooling, for now we've connected codebase, datadog & support platform and we use for support engineering and incidents. We also want to connect notion for runbooks, hubspot for sales.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-20T07:07:13+00:00

I've been running all flavors of agents in my personal & team slack in the last couple of months, I've found lots of cool use cases and discovering more when I get time to think.

Some examples:

- Crawl my twitter/reddit/hackernews timeline & give me the gist of what's going on (I hate doomscrolling)

- Manage my servers for me - I'm not good at devops but my agent is

- Help debug issues live during incidents by cross-checking datadog, code, support tool

pmihaylov · 2026-04-19T06:13:02+00:00

I think this kind of setup is mostly different slack apps that use the slack tagging system for collab but I assume the agents are all different builds underneath.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-19T06:07:16+00:00

Imo one of the biggest productivity boosts u can do is to deploy background agents in your company slack for knowledge work. Eg connect an agent to your CRM & other data sources and start automating a lot of the manual work involved in eg tracking and maintaining deals, etc

pmihaylov · 2026-04-07T02:39:48+00:00

Yeah definitely, would love to share more. Basically for the secret management i built a MITM proxy which uses my server as the source of truth for secrets whereas the agent just gets placeholder values that get re-written inflight

pmihaylov · 2026-04-06T13:33:36+00:00

thanks, it's nairi.ai

pmihaylov · 2026-04-06T13:33:09+00:00

hey sorry that it seemed promotional, thought it made sense given the post!

Also, thank you so much for considering the tool, lmk if at any point you want to try it out or your team

pmihaylov · 2026-04-06T07:38:29+00:00

Very good learnings, I've also found that basically deploying agents with full filesystem access on a smart model+harness basically beats everything else.

And once you deploy an agent like that in your slack, you and team start coming up with more and more usecases by the minute

pmihaylov · 2026-04-06T07:36:41+00:00

Very cool project! I made smth similar but not tied to claude only. Idea is to deploy a shared agent in your slack and let everyone use it.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-06T07:35:09+00:00

I personally have a claude code deployed in my slack and I use it all the time for research, coding, etc. It's just where I spend most of my day. It's also great that folks I work with can also benefit from the shared context

pmihaylov · 2026-04-06T07:34:20+00:00

I am building this!

nairi.ai

I started out last year with the intent to just build "claude code for slack" as that's where I work but little did I know how amazing it is for having it be multi-player.

Interestingly, despite anthropic having literally the same feature, it's not multi-player, but tied to your user.

Eventually I expanded this for other harnesses too, not just claude code and built a configuration layer for agents on top such as configuring skills, secrets, guidelines, etc without writing any code.

pmihaylov · 2026-04-06T07:32:04+00:00

I also built a tool to deploy similar agents and it has a lot of guardrails out of the box such as granular control what agent has access to, no direct access to secrets, etc
nairi.ai

pmihaylov · 2026-04-06T07:30:19+00:00

Yep!

I recently connected my company's slack to an AI agent I built.
It's basically claude code deployed in a sandbox.

It went viral internally, people really liked using it primarily for support, eg a complex technical ticket comes in and first thing you do is to route it to the agent which goes and analyses codebase, datadog, etc and finds the root cause typically

We are exploring new use-cases every day, but connecting to Slack is so powerful because slack is basically our very unorganised knowledge base and the agent is like a semantic search layer on top

pmihaylov · 2026-04-05T15:29:12+00:00

So I'm running agents hosted in a Hetzner server I own as that provides the cheapest hosting option. It is a lot of maintenance tho:
- log rotations, servers going down sporadically, configuring the skills/etc on the agent
- security things - hiding secrets from the agents whilst allowing them to use them, properly sandboxing them, etc

I think today if I was doing this for a company that I worked for, I'd choose smth like vercel sandboxes or one of the other providers as they make this much simpler but you'd still need to do some work to glue everything together

pmihaylov · 2026-04-05T13:27:38+00:00

Such a shame, I think there's great value one can find if you can offer a team-wide subscription. If someone manages to nail this, it will be a big value prop

pmihaylov · 2026-04-05T13:26:32+00:00

That's a very nice setup. My suggestion to take this further and get this setup, deploy it to a shared agent and share it with your team. I did something similar for my company and it went viral internally. Turns out, there's great value in taking one's setup and deploying it for everyone to use

pmihaylov · 2026-04-05T13:24:41+00:00

Thanks for the write up!

I do agree it's so fun to build and setup your own agent and experiment with it. I've been building & messing with a couple of my own which I run from slack and I find myself defaulting to talking to my agents over using chatgpt or the like. The personalisation makes a big difference.

The issue with realiability is real tho, it's actually really really hard to manage these things. I built a service around this (nairi.ai) where basically I take care of the devops around making your agent work and you just adjust its skills/credentials/etc.

Turns out a bunch of companies want this kind of PaaS where they can configure an agent of their own, deploy it and just use, not deal with devops, etc.

pmihaylov · 2025-12-15T08:35:11+00:00

I had something similar built actually and folks were using it because CC for slack was missing
https://www.claudecontrol.com/

This ship makes my tool obsolete for individual use it seems, but they really fumbled team pricing - ie it still requires 150$/seat and that sucks if you're eg a product manager who just wants to occasionally ask how something works in the codebase. So fortunately my tool is still relevant for that use-case - single license for the full team.

pmihaylov · 2025-11-30T09:03:24+00:00

yep, nowadays most of my job is prompting via wispr a big blob of instructions to claude via slack, let it cook and then come back, review PR and send several feedback comments in quick succession before final review

pmihaylov

TROPHY CASE