But that's substantially less useful than Slack's search utility. Believe me, I've spent my fair share of time grepping IRC logs and it certainly works up to a

But that's substantially less useful than Slack's search utility. Believe me, I've spent my fair share of time grepping IRC logs and it certainly works up to a point. What you describe is a pretty lightweight, low-utility solution (are you really going to download six months/a year/10 years worth of logs and depend on your browser's search?). Plus, keep in mind there are other people besides developers. There are product managers, UX engineers, designers, translators, and any other number of people who might not be familiar with grep and would otherwise not need to be. Assuming that only developers need to chat is pretty naive.