Building Slack Agents

Building Slack Agents

Companion skill for the Building Slack Agents course. Build and deploy a Slack agent on Vercel in a single session.

Commands

/slack-agents learn

Start the guided learning loop. Fetches lessons from Academy and drives you through the course.

/slack-agents new

Scaffold and deploy a new Slack agent. Five-stage wizard:

• Project setup — scaffold from Slack Agent Template, configure LLM provider
• Slack app creation — generate customized manifest.json, walk through Slack console
• Environment configuration — signing secret, bot token, API keys with validation
• Local testing — dev server + ngrok tunnel, test in Slack
• Production deployment — deploy to Vercel with env vars configured

/slack-agents submit

Evaluate your current implementation against the active lesson's outcomes.

Content source

https://vercel.com/academy/slack-agents.md           → course overview
https://vercel.com/academy/slack-agents/<lesson>.md   → lesson content

Core concepts

Slack Agent Template

Starting point with OAuth, event subscriptions, and signature verification pre-configured.

Workflow DevKit

Durable agent execution: suspend mid-conversation, wait for human approval, resume. Tool calls auto-retry on failure. Responses stream to Slack in real time.

Human-in-the-loop

Built-in approval pattern: agent posts Approve/Reject buttons, workflow pauses (no compute), resumes on click.

AI Gateway

Route to any model via gateway('anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6'). Automatic failovers during provider outages.

Tools

Custom tools connect to your systems: customer records, support tickets, databases. Each tool has a typed schema so the agent knows when and how to use it.

Progress detection

| Signal | Stage |

|---|---|

| Project scaffolded from template | 1: Setup |

| manifest.json with correct scopes | 2: Slack app |

| .env.local with SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET + SLACK_BOT_TOKEN | 3: Config |

| Dev server running, ngrok tunnel active | 4: Testing |

| Deployed to Vercel with env vars | 5: Production |

Teaching guidelines

• This is a wizard-heavy skill — guide through external console steps (Slack API, Vercel dashboard)
• Validate credentials before moving on (bad tokens waste time)
• When opening external URLs, tell the user exactly what to click
• Test the bot in Slack before deploying — catching issues locally is faster