“non engineers are bothering me in slack, I hate non engineers”
PlsStopSlacking 9000
“Congratulations, you've confused 'I hate interruptions' with 'I hate humans.' Therapy is also an option.”
An agent that auto-responds to non-engineers in Slack, triages their requests, routes them to the right person, and protects your precious flow state so you can pretend to be productive.
This is EMBARRASSINGLY_EASY because Slack's own platform, plus three existing tools, already does 90% of this. The remaining 10% is just a simple bot with GPT-4o that reads messages, detects if the sender is non-technical, and fires a polite auto-reply. The real problem here isn't technical — it's that you work with other humans.
Viability Analysis
Pros & Cons
What's going for it
What's against it
Who You're Up Against
Open Source Alternatives
When Will Big AI Kill This?
Most Likely Killer
Slack (Salesforce)
Timeline: Already happening — Slack AI launched in 2024
How They'll Do It
Slack AI already summarizes threads, auto-responds, and Salesforce is baking Agentforce directly into Slack to handle exactly this kind of message triage natively
Your Survival Strategy
Niche down hard into engineering-team-specific workflows — PR review reminders, incident triage routing, on-call escalation — things Slack AI won't touch because they require deep dev tooling integrations
Confidence
If You're Crazy Enough to Build It
Solo Dev Time
1 weekend for MVP, 2 weeks for something you wouldn't be embarrassed to show people
Team Size
One mildly antisocial backend engineer, which tracks
Estimated Cost
$50-200/month in API costs at scale; $0 to start on Slack free tier
Tech Stack
Want to actually build this?
Work with me to ship it.
Survived the verdict? Good. Let's build the damn thing.
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