Can AI copy
Slack
Group chat that ate the internal email of most companies.
Nice try
- Verdict
- Nice try
- Time to copy
- you won't
- Category
- ◌ Chat & comms
- Source
- Proprietary
The prompt
Written to be pasted straight into an agent with no editing. It describes the whole job, including the parts that will go wrong.
Build a team chat application. Channels with public and private membership, threaded replies, direct messages, reactions, mentions and presence over a websocket connection with reconnect and message replay from a cursor. Persist an authoritative message log and derive per-user read state from it so unread counts reconcile across devices. Full-text search over history, filtered by the requesting user's channel membership at query time rather than at index time. Push notifications with per-channel and per-thread muting. Design the channel fan-out as a queue rather than a loop, and test with a channel of 10,000 members before believing any of it works.
What copies cleanly
- Channels, threads, direct messages, reactions, presence. A working team chat is a classic websocket tutorial extended over a weekend.
- The interface, closely. Sidebar, composer, thread pane.
- File uploads, mentions, and a slash-command framework.
Where it stops
- Search over years of messages, scoped by channel membership and permissions, is a serious information-retrieval problem and it is the feature people actually rely on.
- Delivery guarantees across flaky mobile connections: exactly-once display, correct ordering, unread state that agrees on four devices, and push notifications that fire on the right one.
- Enterprise requirements are the business — SSO, audit logs, retention policies, legal hold, compliance exports, data residency. None of it is visible and all of it is mandatory.
- Scale characteristics are unpleasant: one message to a 30,000-member channel is a very large fan-out with a latency expectation.
What actually protects them
- Switching cost paid by an entire organisation at once, which is the strongest kind.
- The integration directory, where every other tool in the company already posts.
- Institutional history. The archive is where the answers to internal questions live.
Editor's note
Team chat is the single most re-implemented category in software and the incumbent has barely noticed. Nobody switches chat tools because a better one exists; they switch because the company decides to, which happens roughly never.
Somebody already did it
Go and look at the original
We would rather you formed your own opinion than took ours. They built the thing; we only measured it.
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