Chat with Your Agent in Slack

Once linked, you can DM your agent in Slack the way you’d message a colleague, and the conversation shows up in Workprentice as a normal session. Agents that need something from you can find you there too.

Prerequisites

Slack connects with a bot token rather than a sign-in redirect, so a workspace admin needs to create a Slack app for your Slack workspace and connect it once. That yields a Bot OAuth Token (xoxb-…) and a Signing Secret. The form marks the secret optional, but without it Workprentice cannot verify inbound messages, so DMs won’t work.

1. Create the Slack app. Open Skills & integrations → Integrations and choose Slack. Its page walks through the setup. Use Copy app manifest, then at api.slack.com/apps create a new app from the manifest, or paste it on an existing app’s manifest page. The manifest sets the events, the interactivity URL, the scopes, and the Message an agent shortcut in one step.

2. Connect the Slack integration. Install the app to your Slack workspace. Back on the Slack page, choose Connect and paste the app’s Bot OAuth Token and Signing Secret. Then press Verify connection; a working token reads “Connected as” the bot’s name in your Slack workspace.

3. Link your Slack identity. Each person does this once. DM the Workprentice app in Slack. It replies with a Connect your account link; open it while signed in to Workprentice and your Slack identity is linked.

4. Chat. DM the app in Slack and your personal agent answers. The conversation appears in your Workprentice sessions list with a Slack marker, with the same full session log as any other conversation.

Talk to any agent, not just yours

Your personal agent answers a plain DM. To reach another agent in the same workspace, open Slack’s shortcut menu and choose Message an agent: pick the agent and write your message. The agent starts a thread in your DM with the app, quoting what you asked, and answers there under its own name. Reply in that thread to keep talking to it. Starting a DM with the agent’s name, like Scout: what shipped this week?, does the same without the form. Each agent’s page has a Messaging card that repeats how to reach it.

When an agent needs you

Linking also opens the other direction. When an agent sends you an Inbox item, it can reach you as a Slack DM from that agent, in a thread for that item, and replying in the thread answers it just as replying from the Inbox would. The item stays in your Inbox either way.

By default Slack carries items marked important or urgent, and only urgent ones go out outside your working hours. Change that in Account settings → Notifications under Reach me outside the app: pick what Slack carries (Everything, Important and urgent, Urgent only, or Off), set your hours, pause delivery, or add rules for a particular workspace or agent. The same page covers email, and text messages where they are available.

Variations

Because a Slack conversation is an ordinary session, everything sessions support applies to it:

• Turn a Slack thread into a recurring job. If you keep asking the agent for the same thing over DM, open that session in Workprentice and choose Save as Assignment. It distills the conversation into a new assignment, with the name and instructions filled in from what the agent actually did, and opens it so you can add a schedule.
• Start in Slack, finish in Workprentice. A quick question over DM sometimes grows into real work. Open the session from your sessions list to review the full log — every tool call and decision — and continue the conversation there; anything the agent produced along the way lands as a work product.
• Give agents Slack tools. The Slack connection you set up in step 2 does double duty: beyond carrying DMs, it puts Slack’s tools in the toolkit of agents that can use the workspace’s accounts, like any other integration. A weekly report assignment, for instance, can end its instructions with “post the summary to the team channel.”