August is here ☀️ — that last stretch of summer where you can feel the calendar tightening.

Maybe it’s the shorter evenings or the looming September reset, but something about this month makes you want to ship that thing you’ve been sitting on all summer 🚀. Lucky for all of us, the platform has been moving fast: new agent primitives, better tooling, and a wave of features that make building on Slack genuinely exciting right now 🛠️.

Whether you’re deep in a build or just catching up on what dropped over the summer, we’ve got you covered. So settle in, there’s a lot to unpack. ⚒️

Building your first Slack app with the Slack Skills Plugin

The Slack Skills Plugin brings Slack development directly into Claude Code and Cursor giving you guided, multi-step skills that walk you through scaffolding apps, designing Block Kit layouts, and calling Web API methods correctly. This tutorial walks through building a Dictionary Bot slash command in just three prompts: create the app, add the /define command, and enhance the response with rich Block Kit formatting. If you want to stop wrestling with docs and start shipping, the Slack Skills Plugin is your new best friend.

A better DM experience for your Slack agent

We’re introducing the new Agent messaging experience, which moves agent interactions into the Messages tab to mirror natural team communication. This update consolidates conversations into a single, continuous flow with threads that open automatically, creating a more intuitive and less fragmented interface. Developers can easily transition by updating their app manifest to replace assistant_view with agent_view. This change simplifies the user experience while allowing agents to function more like teammates within the standard Slack environment.

Connect Slackbot to your data with MCP

Slackbot can now connect directly to your production systems via MCP, turning it into a client that discovers and calls tools exposed by your own MCP server — no manual routing needed. Setup takes three steps: expose your service with an MCP-compatible framework, add the mcp:connect bot scope, then register your server with Slackbot. It’s a solid unlock for use cases like system status checks, account lookups, and internal runbook queries.

We built a place where our designers could learn AI together

Principal Design Operations Manager Sheila Kazan writes about how the design team navigated AI adoption — not through top-down tool training, but by creating space for curiosity. The mantra that emerged: “Let AI teach you how to use AI.” They ran a Friday series, “Designers Who Vibe & AI,” and three-day cross-functional Builder Days, an internal 3 day event where we canceled all our meetings to focus on AI. Four hard-won lessons came out of it: human judgment is non-negotiable, upfront planning is everything, the harness matters as much as the model, and collaboration models are shifting. A useful read for any team trying to figure out how to actually integrate AI into design work.

🎧 Slack Dev Huddles — Episode 8 live on LinkedIn!

New to the platform? We’ve got you covered — from joining the developer program to setting up your first app, using the Slack CLI, hitting the API, and testing it all locally. Come join us on Linkedin!

Watch the recording on LinkedIn

Recently Merged 🔀

Build Slack Apps Smarter with the Slack Skills Plugin

The Slack Skills Plugin for Claude and Cursor just hit v1.1.0, shipping four new developer skills: Create Slack App, Block Kit, Slack CLI, and Slack API. These skills close the build-time gap — covering everything from scaffolding apps with the CLI and SDK, to validating Block Kit layouts, to calling Web API methods with proper scopes and error handling. Install or upgrade directly in Claude or Cursor.

New Block Kit Data Visualization Block

Block Kit now has a dedicated data visualization block — the same DATA_TABLE block type that powers Slackbot’s upgraded table rendering. If you’ve been stitching together grids with text or markdown blocks, this is what you’ve been waiting for. Structured tabular data now renders as a proper rich table in your app’s messages, giving users a much cleaner way to read and interact with it. Check out the data visualization block reference for the full schema.

New App Creation Flow in App Settings 

The app creation experience just got a complete redesign — and it’s the smoothest on-ramp to building a Slack app we’ve had. Developers can now create and install a new app in a single guided flow: choose from a starter app, agent template, or blank app; review a plain-language “How it works” summary built around What starts it, What it does, and What the user sees; and get real credentials (bot token, app token) immediately on install. You can also download your app files right from the creation screen to pair with the Slack CLI. New apps, or any developer who’s hit that old confusing creation flow, should feel the difference immediately.

Agent Context Has Landed

Your agent apps can now see what a user is looking at when they send a message. Slack automatically passes context — channel, DM, thread, canvas, or list — along with the message event, so agents can ground their responses in the actual workspace context rather than guessing. A new app_context_changed event fires whenever active context shifts, delivering an ordered list of entities the user is viewing. The same context also rides along on message.im and app_home_opened events. Subscribe to Agent Context to opt in.

Happy building! 🚀

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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