April flew by… and somehow we’re already in May. 🌸
Between new launches, experiments, and everything the community has been building, it kind of feels like things are… blooming. And honestly, this might be one of my favorite parts of the year, when ideas start turning into real projects.
So if you’ve been meaning to try something new, build that thing, or finally explore a feature you bookmarked months ago, this is your sign 🙂
Let’s get into it.
Design agents people actually want to use
AI agents shouldn’t just talk, they should act. ⚡️Our new Block Kit updates move beyond text-heavy responses to introduce Cards, Alerts, and Carousels. If you’re building in Slack, this is how you turn agent output into something actionable, scannable, and native to the workflow.
How to keep long-running agents from losing the plot
What happens when your agent needs to stay consistent across hundreds of steps? Slack’s Security team shares a practical approach to managing context without relying on messy message history.
Using structured context channels (like memory, review layers, and timelines), they built a system that stays coherent over time. A must-read if you’re working on multi-step or multi-agent workflows.
What it takes to rebuild notifications at scale
Reworking notifications isn’t just a UX problem — it’s a systems problem. This deep dive shows how Slack unified multiple legacy models into a single, consistent system across platforms.
The result: better user control, higher engagement, and fewer support issues. A great read if you care about system design, migrations, or building at scale.
Slack Dev Day — Live on Linkedin!
Slack Dev Day is a one-day live event where we’ll share what’s actually changing across the platform: from new APIs and capabilities to how developers are building and shipping today. No fluff, just real updates and practical insights.
You’ll get a closer look at what’s coming next, how to make the most of the platform, and why Slack is becoming a natural place to build and run agents.
Tune in live and see what you can build next!
📅Save the date: Wednesday, May 20 2026 | 10:00am PT
📍Where: Watch the event LIVE on Linkedin!
Fresh features that just dropped 🚀
We just shipped a collection of developer features that make it faster than ever to build AI agents on the platform. A single `slack create agent` CLI command gets you started, with Bolt framework support, bring-your-own-LLM flexibility (Claude, OpenAI, Pydantic AI), new open source sample apps, and a brand new Agent Quickstart Guide at docs.slack.dev. Best-in-class agentic experiences, out of the box.
We now support PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange), a critical OAuth security upgrade for desktop and mobile apps like Cursor and Claude Code. Developers can opt in from their app configuration page or manifest, enabling custom URI schemes for auth and protecting against token theft. Over 1,400 apps are already onboarded, with ~200k unique users receiving desktop credentials each weekday.
Sebastian Feliciano, an intern on one of our engineering teams, built next-gen network protocol support into the Prometheus Blackbox Exporter — helping his team probe hundreds of thousands of endpoints at scale. Even better: he open-sourced it, so the whole Prometheus community benefits.
This post tells the story of how our design team took Activity (already the #2 most-used surface, with nearly 60% of Enterprise users relying on it) and evolved it into Activity 2.0: one place to catch up. The challenge? Designing something effortless for casual users while being powerful enough for folks with hundreds of notifications a day. Really thoughtful design work here!
🎧 Slack Dev Huddles — Episode 5: MCP and RTS API (featured app)
In this episode of Slack Dev Huddles, we go deep on two of the biggest platform launches of the year: the Slack MCP Server and the Real-Time Search (RTS) API. Together, they give AI agents secure, real-time access to Slack’s conversational context, so your apps can search messages, retrieve data, and take action on behalf of users across tools. We’re joined by Senior PM Manuela Caicedo, who helped ship both features, to walk through how they work, what developers can build with them today, and what’s coming next.
📅 Next episode: Tuesday May 12th, 2026 • 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ET
We’re always blown away by what our community creates—and we want to highlight *you* next! Whether it’s a handy tool, a step-by-step guide, or an insightful article, if you’re proud of it, we want to hear all about it.
📬 Send us a message at technewsletter@slack-corp.com and share what you’ve been working on.
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