"Does the app already do this?" gets asked in Slack ten times a week, and the answer lives in a repository nobody in that channel can read. So it gets answered from memory, by whoever is around, with the confidence of someone who last looked six months ago.
What it does
- Mention it in a channel or a DM, and it answers from your actual codebase rather than from a guess.
- It watches the channels you choose and triages what lands there.
- When something in the chatter is a real bug, it escalates it as a GitHub issue.
- It uses the signed Slack Events API and acknowledges within three seconds, so Slack never shows your team a timeout.
What it will not do
It never posts on someone's behalf, never DMs your team unprompted, and never closes the issues it files. A bot that can start conversations is a bot people mute; this one only speaks when spoken to, or when it files something for a human to pick up.
The three-second rule
Slack expects an acknowledgement within three seconds and shows an error to the user if it does not get one — which is a problem when the real work takes an AI a minute or more. The recipe acknowledges immediately and hands the actual analysis to a background run, so the channel stays clean while the thinking happens.
Setup takes about five minutes
Clone the repo, run ./setup.sh, pick Slack, and answer a few questions — your IDs, your tokens, your conventions. The installer copies the recipe into your repository, sets your secrets, and prints whatever manual steps are left with your real values already filled in. No server to host, no database to run, nothing to pay for beyond the AI you already use.
Honest status: beta. It is built and smoke-tested, and it carries a live-fire checklist in its README that I am working through one tool at a time. It has not yet been run in a genuinely busy workspace, which is where channel-volume surprises tend to show up. If you hit an edge, open an issue — that is exactly what the beta label is asking for.
The recipe is MIT-licensed and open source: ai-automations. It is one of 35 — see the series overview for the full list and the rules every recipe follows. If your tool is not on the list, name it and I will build the automation for it, free.
FAQ
Will it post in channels on its own?
No. It never posts on someone's behalf and never DMs your team unprompted. It answers when mentioned, and files issues for a human to pick up.
Does Slack time out while the AI is thinking?
No. Slack expects an acknowledgement within three seconds, so the recipe acknowledges immediately and runs the analysis in the background.
Where do bugs it spots end up?
As GitHub issues. It files them and leaves them open — it never closes what it files.
More in this series: Jira · Trello · all 35 automations
Working on something similar?
If you are wiring AI into the tools your team already uses, I am happy to look at it with you. Thirty minutes, no deck — bring the workflow that costs your team the most time and we will work out whether it is automatable. Get in touch.