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If you work somewhere that sometimes involves broken code, followed by someone pinging a coworker in Slack with a harried message like “hey @[human’s name] can you push a quick fix for this?đŸ˜¬” Anthropic just released a beta feature meant to take that human out of the loop.
According to SiliconANGLE, Anthropic is testing a Slack-based version of Claude Code, its coding agent. The intention is for it to be able to catch up on a given discussion, parse the content of the exchange into an engineering task, and then hop into your codebase and make the change. In other words, Claude Code can now, in theory, take out the part of vibecoding where someone has to break a sweat by changing over to the Claude Code tab in their browser and putting in a prompt.
SiliconANGLE (whose word I’m taking at face value because I do not pretend to know how to code) says that after a Slack message, Claude Code can now create new files, mess with existing code, test its own work, and iterate—all after a detailed slack conversation between humans, followed by something like “@Claude fix this.”
The implications are unsettling, even if you don’t sweat the potential replacement of human workers. An AI agent may be lying in wait on Slack waiting for instructions, sort of like an overly sensitive Amazon Alexa waiting for its wake word. Stray remarks can potentially become tasks handed over to a piece of software with the capability to do damage.
Worse, Slack functionality would make it easier for the least technically sophisticated person on a given team to take it upon themself to assign sweeping, complex tasks to the bot. I, for instance, am a blogger, and reading about this made me think, oh wow, if we had this I could fix my own bugs whenever I find them. If you’re an actual software engineer, that should be a very frightening thought.
According to the business data site Demandsage, Slack has 47.2 million daily users working at over 750,000 organizations, including 77% of Fortune 100 companies. That’s a lot of people who should be kept away from this Claude beta feature at all costs.
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Source: Gizmodo