Slack wants to bring AI coding out of the terminal and into group chats with its new product, Slack Code, which embeds AI coding agents directly into dedicated Slack channels. This allows entire teams to watch, steer, review, and ship software together.
How Slack Code Works
Slack Code makes AI coding a collaborative experience, where teams can work on code in real-time. When someone tags a coding agent from any conversation, the agent spins up a project-specific code channel and does the work in the open, complete with code diffs, live previews, and a running plan visible in dedicated tabs.
The agent archives the channel when the job is done, leaving behind a searchable audit trail. This approach is designed to extend the population that can contribute ideas, taste, judgment, and craft to anybody that exists in the Slack, according to Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO.
Collaborative Workflow
In a live demonstration, Jeff Wang, president of new enterprise at Cognition, showed how the Devin coding agent can be used to fix a broken feature in an engineering channel. The agent acknowledges the issue, replies in the thread, investigates, and opens a pull request, all in a transparent and collaborative manner.
The work migrates into a dedicated code channel where anyone, including engineers, product managers, and designers, can jump in and contribute. This workflow is designed to be more like a newsroom, where teams can work together in real-time to produce high-quality output.
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Slack’s executives argue that this approach will improve the quality of the output, as people can see the work being done and comment on it in real-time. This visibility is designed to be a guard against poorly conceived output generated at scale by inexperienced users.
Security Model
Slack Code’s security model is designed to ensure that agents inherit the permissions of the human who invokes them, and nothing more. There is no new identities created for the agents, and they only have access to information that the user has access to.
Implications for Salesforce
Slack Code is a key part of Salesforce’s strategy. The company is positioning itself as an open platform, courting AI companies as partners, and plans to open the code channel APIs to any developer.
The Future of AI Coding
Slack’s executives do not claim that the terminal is dead, but rather that collaborative channels and single-player terminals will coexist. The trust curve will look familiar to anyone who watched teams adopt earlier waves of automation, with people opening up the systems at the beginning and building trust over time.
Slack Code will answer whether the crowd makes the bottlenecks smaller or just louder. As Wang put it: “The bottlenecks have shifted.” The era of the lone developer whispering to an agent in a private tab is ending, and Slack Code is designed to bring teams together to produce high-quality output, similar to how AI task costs are reduced through collaboration.
