Ambient Slack agent that acts unprompted
“Waited for permission. Still waiting.”
Cause
The security review needed for a bot with read access to firm channels was not completed inside the run window, so the agent never went live and nothing was observed.
What was tried, what was hit, what it means
The proposal was to put an agent in four delivery-pod Slack channels with read access and a single write action, posting a summary when it detected a decision being made across more than one thread, and to measure whether the pods kept it or muted it after four weeks. The hypothesis was that at least two of four pods would keep it on. The build took six days and was ready by 20 May.
Read access to channels containing client names required the firm's security review under the same process used for any third-party integration, which was the right call and took longer than the run had left. The review asked a question the proposal had not answered: what the retention and deletion policy was for the message context the agent held in memory. Writing that policy needs the forgetting mechanism that the memory field lists as a would-have-to-be-true, and does not exist yet. The run was closed with the agent built and never switched on.
Nothing was learned about whether pods want an unprompted agent, which was the question. This is an abandoned entry with a clear blocker and the blocker is named.
Returned notes · what the next proposer sees
The agent is built and in the lab repo; the Slack app manifest is scoped to read plus one write. Security review was not refused, it was not completed: the open item is a retention policy for held context. Do not re-propose without that policy attached; it is the whole gap.
The difference between “someone tried this before” and “someone tried this in June, here is what they hit, here is what would need to be true now.”
Lessons
- 01A run that touches firm channels starts the security review on day one, not when the build is ready.
- 02The reviewer's question was better than the proposal; it found a dependency the field had listed and the run had ignored.
- 03Built-but-never-run is still abandoned; the artefact is not the result.
Record
Try again?
Proposals that touch this entry get its returned notes attached automatically.