Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents
41 points - last Thursday at 9:38 PM
Our team lives in Slack, but we don’t have access to the Slack MCP and couldn’t find anything out there that worked for us, so we coded our own agent-slack CLI
* Can paste in Slack URLs
* Token efficient
* Zero-config (auto auth if you use Slack Desktop)
Auto downloads files/snippets.
Also can read Slack canvases as markdown!
MIT License
FranklinJabar
today at 4:41 AM
Using slack makes me so depressed. The interactions we have today pale in comparison to what we had in IRC 30 years ago.
Of course I accept we're stuck with slack. I just have no clue what to write with such a limited interface. The above posted link is a great example of making the most of a tiny interface and coming up short compared to... 30 years ago
impulser_
today at 1:27 AM
I'm glad more people are catching onto lightweight CLI tools and using skills to give llms more tools. It's way better than MCP. I been doing this for awhile now and it's just the best way to gets LLMs to do things with APIs built for humans.
humanperhaps
today at 3:25 AM
From my perspective, this also marks the shift towards agent skills instead of MCP, since agent skills rely on CLI tools. To me, this is also better than MCP since third-party developers can easily reuse existing APIs and libraries instead of needing official MCP support.
Wuzzy
yesterday at 11:53 PM
I believe in an MCP-less future of agent-service interactions and have recently submitted this general alternative (which also supports Slack) based on curl: https://github.com/imbue-ai/latchkey
With that said, a specialized tool like this will almost certainly work better if Slack is the only service you want your agents to interact with. I like that the auth is transparent.
Warning: in Enterprise (Grid) your account will likely be flagged as hijacked, and all of your sessions will be killed.
Slack implemented session hijacking detection a while ago, and using LLM’s without throttling will very likely result in alerts. If you’re on Enterprise; I’d suggest re-slopping a re-implementation of this with ghost Chrome puppeteer.
I ended up vibe coding a script that uses slack token from the browser to download my messages locally. It's not been flagged yet. But my account got flagged when I tried slackdump.
I don't use Slack Grid, but if you open an issue I'm more than happy to work with you on it!
Hansenq
yesterday at 11:17 PM
Oh this is smart! Reading where Slack stores the local data in your filesystem instead of using their API/MCP (which they charge for).
Very clever; similar to OpenAI launching Atlas when websites start blocking bot requests--just build your own browser so your bot becomes an actual user.
BlueOrigin50
last Thursday at 11:09 PM
Oh nice. I just installed and it works pretty well. It wasn't able to find the user names on the thread though.
nwparker
last Thursday at 11:13 PM
You could ask it to convert the names (and it would), since it uses the slack internal userIds
But I will add a flag to do for `slack message read/list`, since it makes sense.
slopusila
yesterday at 10:41 PM
how about support for "auth import-token" so you dont need to keep SLACK_TOKEN in env