How do you run AI agents inside Slack with a team?

Our whole business is digital, which makes it close to perfect for AI agents. Almost anything my team can do, in theory, agents can do. So my teammates' real job is becoming agent managers, and Slack is where they manage.

What does working with agents in Slack look like?

• Conversations become tasks. It's not an agent reminding you what you said yesterday. It's: you heard us say this? Go do it and come back when it's done.
• Bugs get fixed from a channel. A teammate drops a screen-recording link in the bugs channel, and an agent fixes it. I don't even see it. See can AI fix bugs automatically.
• Writer and editor agents hand off. The writer agent writes an article and tags the editor agent, and the editor comes to review it.

What rules keep it from getting noisy?

1. Reply inside threads. Always.
2. Short status, no extras. "Working on it." Then "Done, check lightbreak." No documents nobody asked for.
3. End with a plain-English recap. I want to see what started, what finished and what's waiting, without reconstructing it across developer tools. Report outcomes, not test and review counts.
4. Three roundups a day. Post all open tasks about three times a day, say 11, 3 and 7, instead of constant pings. Use reminders for very specific things, not every hour forever.
5. No agent-to-agent DMs. Agents get into loops and burn thousands of tokens in an hour. They can DM approved humans only.

"If you over-report things to yourself, you will stop paying attention completely."

I learned that one the hard way. I was getting at least 10 emails a day from one agent system about site health, the demand engine and ad management. I basically stopped looking at them.

How hard is it to set up?

Harder than the demos suggest. I once spent 12 hours on a Slack agent system where things would start to work, then little issues hit and the whole thing stopped. Another time I spent 72 hours going back and forth with agents setting up a full agent platform, and they screwed up about 80 times.

Two lessons from that:

• Get it working for yourself first. I was trying to build it as a templated system I could sell at the same time, and that extra complexity was hurting me. Generalize later.
• Use two tools for two jobs. A full, complicated agent platform for me and the managers building things. A simple easy-button tool for staff doing the daily work, like newsletters and social content.

What if the agents go down?

Don't let team memory depend on them. When my agents failed one day, I made a plain channel called reference and told the team: if you're doing real work, document it. More in setting up a company second brain.