Installing agents in Slack skips the custom app

Slack rolled out Add to Slack on Thursday, an installation flow that brings agents built in ten outside platforms into a workspace without a hand-written Slack integration in between. The feature, and a demo of one partner implementation, were covered by The New Stack.

At a glance

• Installation begins inside the partner tool, which handles OAuth, app configuration and permission scoping, so the setup work that once fell to the user now sits with the platform that built the agent.
• The ten launch partners are Hyperagent, LangChain, Lovable, n8n, NanoClaw, OpenAI, Runlayer, Skydive, Superhuman and Vercel, a range of products that runs from point-and-click builders to developer frameworks and open source projects.
• NanoClaw's Marketplace listing acts as a manager app that spins up a separate managed Slack app for each agent, so bots appear under distinct names and can be tagged natively in channels.

Slack's value to agent builders has always been distribution rather than compute, and Add to Slack reads as plumbing for that: the runtime stays with the vendor while Slack keeps the surface where the work is discussed. The harder part of shipping an agent, for most teams, was never the model but the integration, and removing that step likely matters more to small builders than to the platforms with staff to spare.

Partner tools handle OAuth, app configuration and permission scoping

A user starts the installation, and the agent creation, inside the partner tool, Slack says. The partner then handles OAuth, app configuration and permission scoping, and the resulting Slack app can receive messages and mentions and join channels like any other integration.

The runtime itself stays outside Slack, either with the provider or, for tools such as NanoClaw, on a user's own machine or cloud account. The previous approach required users to click through various settings and enable permissions themselves before an agent could reach a workspace.

Slack says installed agents inherit workspace data boundaries and permission controls, and the workspace's app-approval policy still applies. Each app's OAuth scopes and channel membership determine what it can access. Once installed, the agents also appear in Slack's App browser alongside other workspace apps.

Ten launch partners share the same installation path

The launch partners are Hyperagent, LangChain, Lovable, n8n, NanoClaw, OpenAI, Runlayer, Skydive, Superhuman and Vercel. The list runs from point-and-click builders to developer frameworks, and the installation path is the same across all of them, regardless of whether the agent was assembled in a browser or written in code.

Connecting NanoClaw, an open source framework, previously meant creating a custom Slack app and working through its configuration, scopes and authentication. Its Marketplace app now serves as a manager app, with permission to create a separate managed Slack app for each NanoClaw agent.

NanoClaw opens a separate Slack WebSocket connection for each agent, and its host routes incoming messages to the corresponding agent in Slack. Each agent therefore surfaces as its own bot rather than as one shared app handling every mention in the workspace.

A NanoClaw demo produced a team of agents modeled on The Office

In a demo for The New Stack, NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen asked one agent to build a team modeled on characters from The Office. The agents were created and tagged, appeared under distinct names, and Cohen then chatted with them in the channel.

I say create a team for me of agents, and it creates all these agents and tags them. They all pop in, and then we start chatting over here.

Cohen also brought the agents together in a room with a shared Canvas during the demo. Each agent having its own bot is what makes native tagging possible, Cohen said, and he described the arrangement as creating new capabilities inside the workspace.

Where Slack Code fits

Add to Slack is separate from Slack Code, another AI agent feature the company rolled out Thursday. Slack Code creates temporary project channels where supported coding agents present plans, diffs, pull request details and live previews before the channel is archived.

Add to Slack installs an app, while Slack Code structures the work of a small group of coding agents from Slack's partners after installation. No timeline has been given for extending the flow to tools beyond the ten launch partners named on Thursday.