communication

Build a slack copilot in YAML

An @mention-able assistant that lives in a Slack thread, answers questions, and runs tools.

channels.slackwebcredentials

The pattern

The pattern most teams reach for first: a Slack bot that wraps an agent. The user mentions the bot, the message becomes the goal, the agent answers in-thread. Tool calls show up as status updates so the user can see what's happening. No custom Slack app code, no webhook plumbing, the runtime ships the channel module.

What good looks like

Sub-3-second response time on simple questions
Status updates while tools are running, never silent
Threaded replies, not channel pollution
Graceful timeout if a tool hangs

Common pitfalls

Letting the bot respond to every message in a channel
Forgetting per-user context isolation in shared workspaces
Skipping the streaming response, users wait silently
Hard-coding tokens instead of using credentials

The minimum YAML to ship this

app.yaml

1modules:2  channels:3    config:4      slack:5        bot_token: { credential: slack_bot }6        respond_in_thread: true7        stream_status: true8  web: {}910agents:11  - id: helper12    modules: [{web: [search, fetch]}, {channels: [slack_post]}]13    brain: { model: claude-haiku-4-5 }14    system_prompt: "Answer concisely. Cite sources. Stay in the thread."

Ship in 5 minutes

Install Digitorn and deploy this agent

# 1. install runtime
curl -sSL https://digitorn.ai/install | sh

# 2. save the YAML above to ~/.digitorn/apps/my-slack-bot/app.yaml
mkdir -p ~/.digitorn/apps/my-slack-bot
# paste the YAML into app.yaml

# 3. deploy
digitorn deploy my-slack-bot

Read the deep dive

10 apps you can ship in 50 lines of YAML

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Engineering notes from the Digitorn team. No marketing, no launch announcements, no "10 prompts that will change your life". Just the things we write that we'd want to read.

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The minimum YAML to ship this

app.yaml

1modules:2  channels:3    config:4      slack:5        bot_token: { credential: slack_bot }6        respond_in_thread: true7        stream_status: true8  web: {}910agents:11  - id: helper12    modules: [{web: [search, fetch]}, {channels: [slack_post]}]13    brain: { model: claude-haiku-4-5 }14    system_prompt: "Answer concisely. Cite sources. Stay in the thread."

# 1. install runtime curl -sSL https://digitorn.ai/install | sh # 2. save the YAML above to ~/.digitorn/apps/my-slack-bot/app.yaml mkdir -p ~/.digitorn/apps/my-slack-bot # paste the YAML into app.yaml # 3. deploy digitorn deploy my-slack-bot