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The industry has spent the past year dragging coding agents out of the terminal and toward the team. Slack's contribution, launched Thursday, is a container: Slack Code, a channel type with a fixed lifespan that only a machine is permitted to open.

The mechanics are straightforward. An agent mentioned anywhere in a workspace judges whether the request fits in a reply; if it doesn't, the agent opens a channel carrying its plan, the target repository and branch, code diffs, pull request details and a live HTML preview, then archives the whole thing once the work lands. Reviewers can intervene mid-run by requesting changes or stopping the agent, and the archived record stays searchable — Slack positions it as an audit trail. Humans cannot open these channels, at least in this release, and each one inherits the visibility of wherever the agent was summoned.

A gap between two containers

Katie Steigman, Slack's vice president of product, framed the design to The New Stack as filling a hole between the two containers Slack already had. Threads buckle under a long session that keeps drawing in new participants; ordinary channels, built as durable team spaces, outlast an agent's task by design. A code channel splits the difference by ending when the work does — a constraint Steigman suggested may loosen, since human-created code channels aren't ruled out permanently.

Her broader pitch is about where the work happens. Agent sessions today are largely single-player, she argues, with an engineer alone in a terminal, and the value of moving them into a shared surface is that colleagues can watch and intervene.

Deliberately thin

Scope is narrow on purpose. Slack built an API letting partner agents create and manage the channel type and stopped there — no model, no harness, no runtime, and per Steigman no dependency on Model Context Protocol or Agent2Agent, even though Slack ships an MCP server for other purposes. Anthropic's Claude, Cognition's Devin, GitHub Copilot and Vercel are live at launch with OpenAI's ChatGPT queued behind them, API access stays limited to those partners for now, and the feature carries no surcharge on any plan, free workspaces included.

Salesforce hosting the competition

Free access for four rival agent vendors, inside a product Salesforce owns while selling Agentforce, is a distribution play rather than a charitable one. Slack is wagering that reviewing agent output is a more defensible position than producing it — GitHub put down the same chip when Agent HQ opened to Claude and Codex alongside Copilot. The supporting claim, that a project's bug reports, screenshots and prior decisions already live in Slack, is one Atlassian and every other SaaS incumbent makes about its own surface too.

Permissions deserve the closest reading. Agents inherit existing admin controls and are scoped per deployment: Slack's internal agent, Spec, sees whatever Steigman can see, while customers can narrow the aperture considerably. Consequential steps still route through a person — in a demo, the sample change needed human pull request approval in GitHub before it could ship.

Not the only container

Anthropic arrived in June with Claude Tag, a shared beta agent for Team and Enterprise customers that operates under its own workspace identity rather than borrowing the permissions of whoever called it. Block's Buzz, Apache 2.0-licensed and self-hostable in a way Slack Code is not, binds a project across any number of channels while carrying repositories, inline diffs, issues, continuous integration results and merge decisions under a single identity system. Its shortfall is distribution: most companies, Block included, already run Slack.

What Slack is measuring now is behavior rather than capability. Teams have already aimed code channels at documents, presentations and incident response despite an interface built around repositories and branches, which hints the lifespan-bounded channel generalizes well past code. The risk running the other direction is volume, and Steigman's stated goal is adding agents without the workspace collapsing into bot noise.

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Slack's New Channel Type Can Only Be Created by a Coding Agent

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Slack's New Channel Type Can Only Be Created by a Coding Agent