Slack sandboxes and CLI speed up AI agent creation (Full Transcript)

[00:00:07] Speaker 1: Good morning and hello, I'm Jeremiah, I'm a staff developer advocate here at Slack. And as a developer advocate, I get to talk to a lot of developers, and earlier this year I was at TDX and I got to talk to one particularly disgruntled developer. And he was disgruntled not because his job got hard, he was disgruntled because he made the unfortunate decision to become important at work. You see, James had been at this company for 10 years, and he just gathered a bunch of knowledge in his head, and that means that everyone came to James. Can you help me get access to GitHub, can you onboard the new hires, how do I fix this JIRA thing? And so James came to me at TDX and he said, Jeremiah, how do I offload this to something else, someone else, like a bot or something? And James loved what I had to say next. I said it's never been easier to build on Slack, to go from I have an idea to this is a working thing that people can use. And for most people, that journey starts right here, the Slack developer program. The Slack developer program has a lot of amazing features, I'm not going to cover all of them, but I will cover my favorite feature, which is sandboxes. Because since the dawn of time, if people wanted to create a Slack application, they had to spin up a free workspace, which was problematic, or they had to develop directly in production, which was also problematic. And so we heard that feedback, and we created the developer program with sandboxes. With sandboxes, you can create up to 10 at a time, they default to 180 days, and you have the option to extend if you're still working on something. And it's very easy to provision a sandbox, you just click this button, and you fill out some basic information. My favorite option is here, because you can actually seed workspaces with real data, different data types, images, links, so that when you're building applications, it has real data and conversations and threads to work with. Now I've already built out and clicked those buttons and created Slack Dev Day. Slack Dev Day has these channels that were built, and now I have a working ecosystem, a working environment for James to bring his idea to life. But he still needs to build the idea. So this is a terminal for the vibe coders in the room, and we have the Slack CLI installed. So from here, I'm just gonna write Slack create agent. And I think that for James, an IT support agent would be kind of what he's looking for, so we're gonna start there. We're gonna pick JavaScript, of course, and then we can choose our provider if we want to start with Cloud or OpenAI. Let's choose Cloud. So what we're doing now is we have some repos that the Slack developer team has created, and we're essentially cloning it and kind of molding it into our own application. So I'm going to change directories into virtual James, and we're up and running. Before I hit Slack create, though, I need to connect my application to that workspace that I just created. So to do that, very simple again, I'm gonna type Slack login. I'm going to copy this, head back over to Slack, and paste it into any channel. Here we're going to approve this handful of permissions, take a second, look over it, and click confirm, and once again, we're gonna complete this handshake by copying the challenge code, heading back to the terminal, and pressing enter. Sweet. So now we have our development environment connected to our workspace, and now let's see what this app can do. So I'm gonna type Slack run to start up a local version of our IT agent, our virtual James, and we're gonna get it to the right environment, which is Slack Dev Day. So after a few seconds, our app should be up and running, so I can come into channel, and my agent has already made its way to my environment. And immediately I'm able to interact with this virtual James, but you need to spend just a few minutes onboarding the AI to know how you talk and the resources of truth that make your agent an actual virtual version of you. But Slack was always designed to be the 2% of your IT spend that enables the other 98% to be more valuable. And that includes agents, so no matter where you're building an agent, you can automatically and instantaneously get it into Slack. We built an agent in Brazil, and we wanted to get it into Slack. And with that new feature that we just launched, we were easily able to do that. So the feature's called, once again, add to Slack, which just abstracts all of the details away from the developer. So they say, I have an agent, I want it in Slack, I'm gonna click this add to Slack button. And in doing so, we'll handle the bot scopes, the permissions, getting it into your environment so that you can focus on the things that really matter instead of the little tiny commas and details and errors. So that was a triage agent built in Brazil. And I can actually interact with it if I say, hey, I'm having problems with this blog on the homepage, can you help me out? Now this is a live demo, this is a real working agent, so it will take some time to go through that, but I've already had that conversation prior to going on stage for the sake of time. And it's really working. So I showed James all of this, and he was so happy because he finally understood, if I have an idea, maybe 10 to 15 minutes of time, I can make my ideas come to life in Slack.