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Show HN: The Channels SDK – Bring Any Agent to Any Channel (Slack, MS Teams)

49 pointsby davidmckayvtoday at 4:05 PM13 commentsview on HN

Comments

ChaseRensbergertoday at 5:35 PM

I think this is likely a very good idea. I've thought about the idea of channels a lot building https://wingman.actor and I've gone back in forth on if channel primitives are a good idea at a low level or if existing chat clients are just an already well defined utility you shouldn't rewrite.

I think your approach of a unified SDK/data structure around a chat that adapts to different clients is a really strong solution that probably just gives you the best of both worlds.

chengyongrutoday at 4:40 PM

I dont think it s really open source, the MIT part is just the client. The service that actually makes it run is closed and license-gated.

show 1 reply
mikeryan52today at 4:33 PM

Hi folks! I'm one of the engineers working on the Channels SDK. This is our first public release. Our emphasis has been on making agents act like natural participants in Slack and Teams, while letting them generate UI along the way. It's built on top of AG-UI, so any agent that emits AG-UI can be brought to Slack or Teams.

We've been dogfooding this internally and have seen a surge of tiny, task-specific agents enter our channels. A lunchbot agent wraps the DoorDash CLI to handle office lunch orders, a pupfood agent wraps the Pup and GitHub CLIs to do incident triage, and a chadbot generates marketing videos on demand from GitHub PRs. We've got even more that compose PostHog, Notion, Linear, and other internal tools we use.

I had previously been pretty hot about bringing agents to the web, but I'm increasingly convinced that chat interfaces are the most natural home for useful agents.

Happy to answer any questions about our approach here!

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opwizardxtoday at 5:17 PM

Is it like a proprietary wrapper for Vercel’s Chat SDK (https://github.com/vercel/chat)?

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SwellJoetoday at 5:52 PM

I dread the day when my employer's Slack includes chatbots rambling all over it.

davidmckayvtoday at 5:21 PM

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recensoriumtoday at 5:05 PM

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Natalia724today at 5:01 PM

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