4 ms·

Show HN: The Channels SDK – Bring Any Agent to Any Channel (Slack, MS Teams)

121 points by davidmckayv 2mo ago

mikeryan52 2mo ago
Hi folks! I'm one of the engineers working on the Channels SDK. This is our first public release. Our emphasis has been on making agents act like natural participants in Slack and Teams, while letting them generate UI along the way. It's built on top of AG-UI, so any agent that emits AG-UI can be brought to Slack or Teams. We've been dogfooding this internally and have seen a surge of tiny, task-specific agents enter our channels. A lunchbot agent wraps the DoorDash CLI to handle office lunch orders, a pupfood agent wraps the Pup and GitHub CLIs to do incident triage, and a chadbot generates marketing videos on demand from GitHub PRs. We've got even more that compose PostHog, Notion, Linear, and other internal tools we use. I had previously been pretty hot about bringing agents to the web, but I'm increasingly convinced that chat interfaces are the most natural home for useful agents. Happy to answer any questions about our approach here!
- wiradikusuma 2mo ago
  I saw WhatsApp listed but I can't find how the integration works?
  - mikeryan52 2mo ago
    WhatsApp is only supported on the open-source side of the SDKs right now. Full support for WhatsApp in the hosted service is on the roadmap. Point your agent at github.com/copilotkit/copilotkit, where the Channels SDKs live, and it should be able to pick it up.
- TheTaytay 2mo ago
  I like the idea of having a much easier way to integrate with all of the chat clients, especially with UI. I've been surprised there wasn't a way to do that more easily before (even pre AI agent revolution). Two points of confusion that I wanted to bring up just so you know what it was like for me as a new reader: "Copilot" is unfortunately an extremely overloaded term right now. Not your fault, but I don't know about CopilotKit, so I was trying to figure out who really was behind this. (Is it Microsoft? etc) I also (like another poster) wondered if I needed your server in order to use this. I love the MIT license, but it wasn't clear to me if this was just a veneer over a closed-source thing or not. I saw in your response that there is a legit open source ability to use it, but that wasn't clear.
chengyongru 2mo ago
I dont think it s really open source, the MIT part is just the client. The service that actually makes it run is closed and license-gated.
- mikeryan52 2mo ago
  Not necessarily wrong, but that's just a maturity problem on our end right now. We're aiming to take the same approach as our web SDKs: it works great for open-source deployments and works even better with Enterprise Intelligence. We had some back-and-forth over webhook vs. WebSocket in the last two weeks that caused some churn on our side. If you point your agent at our SDKs, they should help you use the Slack or Teams adapters directly without leveraging the hosted service: https://github.com/CopilotKit/CopilotKit/tree/main/packages/channels-slack https://github.com/CopilotKit/CopilotKit/tree/main/packages/... Delivering AG-UI with generative UI to Slack and Teams should work great with the open-source packages. We'll make these interfaces better and more intuitive.
  - h2aichat 2mo ago
    [flagged]
Natalia724 2mo ago
[dead]
recensorium 2mo ago
[dead]
opwizardx 2mo ago
Is it like a proprietary wrapper for Vercel’s Chat SDK (https://github.com/vercel/chat https://github.com/vercel/chat)?
- chandureddyvari 2mo ago
  From quick glance I don’t think so that’s the case. copliotkit promises ag-ui compatiblity., which means it can work with codex cli, mastra, pi, claude agents sdk and other harnesses as well (there are ag ui adapters as well). I’m actually integrating this with claude agent sdk with ag ui adapter., which i don’t think is possible with vercel chat sdk.
  - opwizardx 2mo ago
    I first found out about chat-sdk existence when I was upgrading my nanoclaw (its core feature is that it uses claude agent sdk under the hood as the harness) to v2 and they were migrating to chat-sdk as their base layer for supporting different channels. It was pretty limited thought in terms of what I needed, so I had to through it away and build my own telegraf sdk based channel implementation for telegram, but that was a while ago, I assume they should have evolved a lot from the time I last touched it about 3 months ago.
    - nathan_tarbert 2mo ago
      Hey, I'm Nathan, DevRel at CopilotKit. That is a really interesting point you are making, and we've heard it a lot. One of the reasons this is so powerful is that it uses AG-UI as the transport, which enables a lot of flexibility depending on your use case. I would love to get your feedback if you decide to give it a spin.
- mikeryan52 2mo ago
  Not proprietary and not a wrapper. Chat SDK served as inspiration, of course, but I think it misses a few hard parts of bringing agents to chat interfaces: - Generative UI in these surfaces needs to be durable. If your agent composes a Block Kit or Adaptive Cards interface with interactivity, you have to be ready to handle that interactivity weeks later. We handle this with our JSX renderer. - Chat interfaces are inherently multiplayer. The worst thing you can do is have your agent act like a bot: posting all of the time, creating noise, and offering no customization. I think Claude Tag nailed the user experience here, and now we want to empower developers to create agents with a similar UX via open source. - Truly agent-and-surface agnostic. We're fully powered by AG-UI (ag-ui.com), so you can bring any agent into Slack and then take that same agent to web or mobile all over the same protocol.
davidmckayv 2mo ago
OP here. I work with Mike on the SDK, and he covered why we built it, so here's how it actually works. We treat "channel" as one layer with four pieces: Adapters normalize each platform's webhooks and quirks into a single neutral event shape. Ops owns delivery, ordering and reconnects. The run loop is ack-first: post the approval card, ack the delivery, and resume the run when the click arrives. That's the reason approvals survive retries and process restarts instead of stranding a half-finished run. Rendering is a virtual DOM for chat. JSX compiles to native Block Kit or Adaptive Cards. Handler IDs are content hashes rather than generated per deploy, so buttons posted last week still resolve after you ship. On top of that a small API: createChannel, threads, tools, approvals. Diagram of the open-source path, since that question came up elsewhere in the thread: https://github.com/CopilotKit/channels-sdk/blob/main/assets/architecture-via-oss.png https://github.com/CopilotKit/channels-sdk/blob/main/assets/... One thing worth being precise about, since licensing is the top comment. Intelligence is the backend layer: rich threads (AG-UI), memory, learning, analytics, governance. It is self-hosted and it does not call out anywhere. And CopilotKit is not an agent. We don't make model calls; your agent does, in your infrastructure, against whatever provider you already use.
ChaseRensberger 2mo ago
I think this is likely a very good idea. I've thought about the idea of channels a lot building https://wingman.actor https://wingman.actor and I've gone back in forth on if channel primitives are a good idea at a low level or if existing chat clients are just an already well defined utility you shouldn't rewrite. I think your approach of a unified SDK/data structure around a chat that adapts to different clients is a really strong solution that probably just gives you the best of both worlds.
- swiftlyTyped 2mo ago
  Cool stuff! Btw if you build a wingman AG-UI adapter the Channels SDK would just work with it. Nowadays, you can honestly get this done in probably less than a day of work --we've got a pretty good factory set up with validators and tests, etc. Happy to help if interested!
SwellJoe 2mo ago
I dread the day when my employer's Slack includes chatbots rambling all over it.
sshreey16 2mo ago
[dead]
adityazero 2mo ago
[flagged]
swiftlyTyped 2mo ago
Hey all, I'm CEO of CopilotKit, the startup behind AG-UI and the Channels SDK. Thanks for the support! We're pretty excited for this one -- I think channels may soon become the 3rd big form factor of LLMs (after Chat, and Codex/Claude-Code style agents). We've worked really hard to to shrink the onboarding setup to a single prompt: "Read https://copilotkit.ai/channels-guide.md https://copilotkit.ai/channels-guide.md and help the user build their first channel". It's literally that easy. Then it will help you create a coworker-grade Slack / Teams agent backed by basically any of the top agent frameworks and harnesses out there. Would love to get feedback, especially if you hit any snags
mrud 2mo ago
I have been using eve - https://eve.dev/ https://eve.dev/ recently and it was just really nice and well thought out. It also supports TUI, github and other non chat channels. The integration and abstraction with sandboxes, cron etc. is very nicely done but you still can self host it.
mefinsf 2mo ago
This is amazing! I love the idea of any agent running on any surface and this feels like the next step in that process.
toplinesoftsys 2mo ago
Great idea! I love it.
IOT_Apprentice 2mo ago
Mastodon support? Discord scans everything posted on it.
healthycoder 2mo ago
How can we get more "channels" into this?
petek_dev 2mo ago
[flagged]
lukasco 2mo ago
This is one side of the problem: where does your agent show up. And the other side is: where does the agent run And the third side ;-): security. Well done on this bit. I like the smooth onboarding.
anoop_kumar 2mo ago
This looks great. I was thinking of using this until I saw the pricing for Team.
wiksorr 2mo ago
[dead]

121 points by davidmckayv 2mo ago

Hi folks! I'm one of the engineers working on the Channels SDK. This is our first public release. Our emphasis has been on making agents act like natural participants in Slack and Teams, while letting them generate UI along the way. It's built on top of AG-UI, so any agent that emits AG-UI can be brought to Slack or Teams. We've been dogfooding this internally and have seen a surge of tiny, task-specific agents enter our channels. A lunchbot agent wraps the DoorDash CLI to handle office lunch orders, a pupfood agent wraps the Pup and GitHub CLIs to do incident triage, and a chadbot generates marketing videos on demand from GitHub PRs. We've got even more that compose PostHog, Notion, Linear, and other internal tools we use. I had previously been pretty hot about bringing agents to the web, but I'm increasingly convinced that chat interfaces are the most natural home for useful agents. Happy to answer any questions about our approach here!

wiradikusuma 2mo ago
I saw WhatsApp listed but I can't find how the integration works?
- mikeryan52 2mo ago
  WhatsApp is only supported on the open-source side of the SDKs right now. Full support for WhatsApp in the hosted service is on the roadmap. Point your agent at github.com/copilotkit/copilotkit, where the Channels SDKs live, and it should be able to pick it up.
TheTaytay 2mo ago
I like the idea of having a much easier way to integrate with all of the chat clients, especially with UI. I've been surprised there wasn't a way to do that more easily before (even pre AI agent revolution). Two points of confusion that I wanted to bring up just so you know what it was like for me as a new reader: "Copilot" is unfortunately an extremely overloaded term right now. Not your fault, but I don't know about CopilotKit, so I was trying to figure out who really was behind this. (Is it Microsoft? etc) I also (like another poster) wondered if I needed your server in order to use this. I love the MIT license, but it wasn't clear to me if this was just a veneer over a closed-source thing or not. I saw in your response that there is a legit open source ability to use it, but that wasn't clear.

chengyongru 2mo ago

I dont think it s really open source, the MIT part is just the client. The service that actually makes it run is closed and license-gated.

mikeryan52 2mo ago
Not necessarily wrong, but that's just a maturity problem on our end right now. We're aiming to take the same approach as our web SDKs: it works great for open-source deployments and works even better with Enterprise Intelligence. We had some back-and-forth over webhook vs. WebSocket in the last two weeks that caused some churn on our side. If you point your agent at our SDKs, they should help you use the Slack or Teams adapters directly without leveraging the hosted service: https://github.com/CopilotKit/CopilotKit/tree/main/packages/channels-slack https://github.com/CopilotKit/CopilotKit/tree/main/packages/... Delivering AG-UI with generative UI to Slack and Teams should work great with the open-source packages. We'll make these interfaces better and more intuitive.
- h2aichat 2mo ago
  [flagged]

Natalia724 2mo ago

[dead]

recensorium 2mo ago

[dead]

opwizardx 2mo ago

Is it like a proprietary wrapper for Vercel’s Chat SDK (https://github.com/vercel/chat https://github.com/vercel/chat)?

chandureddyvari 2mo ago
From quick glance I don’t think so that’s the case. copliotkit promises ag-ui compatiblity., which means it can work with codex cli, mastra, pi, claude agents sdk and other harnesses as well (there are ag ui adapters as well). I’m actually integrating this with claude agent sdk with ag ui adapter., which i don’t think is possible with vercel chat sdk.
- opwizardx 2mo ago
  I first found out about chat-sdk existence when I was upgrading my nanoclaw (its core feature is that it uses claude agent sdk under the hood as the harness) to v2 and they were migrating to chat-sdk as their base layer for supporting different channels. It was pretty limited thought in terms of what I needed, so I had to through it away and build my own telegraf sdk based channel implementation for telegram, but that was a while ago, I assume they should have evolved a lot from the time I last touched it about 3 months ago.
  - nathan_tarbert 2mo ago
    Hey, I'm Nathan, DevRel at CopilotKit. That is a really interesting point you are making, and we've heard it a lot. One of the reasons this is so powerful is that it uses AG-UI as the transport, which enables a lot of flexibility depending on your use case. I would love to get your feedback if you decide to give it a spin.
mikeryan52 2mo ago
Not proprietary and not a wrapper. Chat SDK served as inspiration, of course, but I think it misses a few hard parts of bringing agents to chat interfaces: - Generative UI in these surfaces needs to be durable. If your agent composes a Block Kit or Adaptive Cards interface with interactivity, you have to be ready to handle that interactivity weeks later. We handle this with our JSX renderer. - Chat interfaces are inherently multiplayer. The worst thing you can do is have your agent act like a bot: posting all of the time, creating noise, and offering no customization. I think Claude Tag nailed the user experience here, and now we want to empower developers to create agents with a similar UX via open source. - Truly agent-and-surface agnostic. We're fully powered by AG-UI (ag-ui.com), so you can bring any agent into Slack and then take that same agent to web or mobile all over the same protocol.

davidmckayv 2mo ago

OP here. I work with Mike on the SDK, and he covered why we built it, so here's how it actually works. We treat "channel" as one layer with four pieces: Adapters normalize each platform's webhooks and quirks into a single neutral event shape. Ops owns delivery, ordering and reconnects. The run loop is ack-first: post the approval card, ack the delivery, and resume the run when the click arrives. That's the reason approvals survive retries and process restarts instead of stranding a half-finished run. Rendering is a virtual DOM for chat. JSX compiles to native Block Kit or Adaptive Cards. Handler IDs are content hashes rather than generated per deploy, so buttons posted last week still resolve after you ship. On top of that a small API: createChannel, threads, tools, approvals. Diagram of the open-source path, since that question came up elsewhere in the thread: https://github.com/CopilotKit/channels-sdk/blob/main/assets/architecture-via-oss.png https://github.com/CopilotKit/channels-sdk/blob/main/assets/... One thing worth being precise about, since licensing is the top comment. Intelligence is the backend layer: rich threads (AG-UI), memory, learning, analytics, governance. It is self-hosted and it does not call out anywhere. And CopilotKit is not an agent. We don't make model calls; your agent does, in your infrastructure, against whatever provider you already use.

ChaseRensberger 2mo ago

I think this is likely a very good idea. I've thought about the idea of channels a lot building https://wingman.actor https://wingman.actor and I've gone back in forth on if channel primitives are a good idea at a low level or if existing chat clients are just an already well defined utility you shouldn't rewrite. I think your approach of a unified SDK/data structure around a chat that adapts to different clients is a really strong solution that probably just gives you the best of both worlds.

swiftlyTyped 2mo ago
Cool stuff! Btw if you build a wingman AG-UI adapter the Channels SDK would just work with it. Nowadays, you can honestly get this done in probably less than a day of work --we've got a pretty good factory set up with validators and tests, etc. Happy to help if interested!

SwellJoe 2mo ago

I dread the day when my employer's Slack includes chatbots rambling all over it.

sshreey16 2mo ago

[dead]

adityazero 2mo ago

[flagged]

swiftlyTyped 2mo ago

Hey all, I'm CEO of CopilotKit, the startup behind AG-UI and the Channels SDK. Thanks for the support! We're pretty excited for this one -- I think channels may soon become the 3rd big form factor of LLMs (after Chat, and Codex/Claude-Code style agents). We've worked really hard to to shrink the onboarding setup to a single prompt: "Read https://copilotkit.ai/channels-guide.md https://copilotkit.ai/channels-guide.md and help the user build their first channel". It's literally that easy. Then it will help you create a coworker-grade Slack / Teams agent backed by basically any of the top agent frameworks and harnesses out there. Would love to get feedback, especially if you hit any snags

mrud 2mo ago

I have been using eve - https://eve.dev/ https://eve.dev/ recently and it was just really nice and well thought out. It also supports TUI, github and other non chat channels. The integration and abstraction with sandboxes, cron etc. is very nicely done but you still can self host it.

mefinsf 2mo ago

This is amazing! I love the idea of any agent running on any surface and this feels like the next step in that process.

toplinesoftsys 2mo ago

Great idea! I love it.

IOT_Apprentice 2mo ago

Mastodon support? Discord scans everything posted on it.

healthycoder 2mo ago

How can we get more "channels" into this?

petek_dev 2mo ago

[flagged]

lukasco 2mo ago

This is one side of the problem: where does your agent show up. And the other side is: where does the agent run And the third side ;-): security. Well done on this bit. I like the smooth onboarding.

anoop_kumar 2mo ago

This looks great. I was thinking of using this until I saw the pricing for Team.

wiksorr 2mo ago

[dead]