---
title: "Introduction"
description: "SlackHive turns your Slack workspace into a team of AI agents - specialists you @mention, a Boss that coordinates, and memory that compounds over time."
---

## Build your AI-first company on Slack

<img src="/images/slack-ai-agent-team-dashboard-with-avatars.png" alt="SlackHive dashboard showing the AI agent team" style={{borderRadius: '12px', margin: '24px 0 8px'}} />

<p style={{textAlign: 'center', color: '#737373', fontSize: '14px', margin: '0 0 8px'}}>
  <b>What it looks like in Slack</b> — a SlackHive agent collaborating with the team in a real channel: daily report, follow-up questions, metric correction, and an inline PR.
</p>

<img src="/images/slackhive-in-action-growth-analytics.png" alt="SlackHive agent collaborating in a Slack growth-analytics channel: daily growth report, follow-up questions, and an inline metric correction with a PR" style={{borderRadius: '12px', margin: '4px 0 24px'}} />

It's Tuesday morning. Revenue is down 8% and the standup is in 20 minutes.

```
CEO:       @data-analyst revenue dropped 8% overnight, what happened?
           [40 seconds later]
DataBot:   Enterprise tier churn spiked after yesterday's pricing page change.
           3 accounts, $42k ARR. I've flagged the affected records in Notion.
```

No BI dashboard. No analyst context-switch. The CEO walks into standup with the answer.

Across the company, in the same Slack:

```
Engineer:  @devops checkout is throwing 500s
DevOps:    Memory leak in the payment processor pool.
           PR #847 is up with the fix — ready for review.

PM:        @designer mock up a simpler onboarding flow
Designer:  Done. 3 variants in Figma — link in thread.
           Which direction do you want to take?
```

This is what that team's Slack looks like **after one month with SlackHive** — not a demo, just a Tuesday.

---

## The idea behind it

> A workspace where humans and AI agents work side by side beats any team made of just one or the other.

That's the bet. Not "AI replaces your team" — a genuinely hybrid team collaborating in the same Slack channels, on the same threads, with the same `@mention` your team already uses for each other.

You don't switch to a separate AI app. You don't open a new tab. You `@data-analyst` in `#sales` the way you'd ping a real one. The agent reads the full thread, queries your warehouse, posts the answer in 40 seconds — while your `@designer` is mocking flows in Figma in another channel and `@devops` is quietly opening a PR for the 500s the engineer just complained about.

**Why this beats every alternative:**

| | Why it loses |
|---|---|
| All-human team | Slow, lots of context-switching, "let me get back to you" everywhere |
| One mega-AI assistant (single ChatGPT-style entry point) | No domain expertise, no team patterns, lives outside your workflow |
| AI tools with their own siloed UI | Separate interface = friction = nobody uses it after week two |
| **Humans + AI agents in Slack** | **Each does what it's best at, in the place the work already happens** |

**Anyone on the team can create an agent.** No engineers required. If you can describe what you need, you can deploy it in minutes.

<Note>
  **Under the hood:** small specialist agents instead of one mega-agent (Karpathy's *specialists beat generalists*), each grounded in a per-folder Karpathy-style wiki (LLMs read structured wikis better than raw file dumps), with a Boss agent that delegates so no one context window has to hold the whole company. The architecture is the means; the team-in-Slack experience is the point.
</Note>

---

## Two ways to work

**Tag a specialist directly** when you know who handles it. **Tag `@boss`** when you don't — Boss finds the right specialist, delegates in the thread, and summarizes the result.

```
You:     @boss can you analyze last week's conversion funnel?
Boss:    On it — looping in @data-analyst 👇
         @data-analyst conversion funnel for last week. Tag @boss when done.

DataBot: Conversions up 12% WoW, driven by a 3× jump in checkout completion.
         @boss — done!

Boss:    Checkout was the story last week — completion rate tripled.
         Want a channel or cohort breakdown?
```

Every specialist receives the **full Slack thread** as context. Nothing is lost in the handoff.

---

## How SlackHive works

<Steps>
  <Step title="Create an agent">
    Pick one of 26 research-backed personas (or start blank). Give it a name, connect it to a Slack app, and you're live in about 5 minutes.
  </Step>
  <Step title="Connect it to your tools">
    Assign MCP servers to give the agent real capabilities - query a database, read files, call an API, create Jira tickets, update Notion pages.
  </Step>
  <Step title="Tune with Coach">
    Open the Coach panel, describe what you want in plain English, and approve the proposed skill and prompt changes. No hand-editing.
  </Step>
  <Step title="Your team @mentions it in Slack">
    The agent wakes up, reads the thread for context, uses its tools, and replies directly in the thread.
  </Step>
  <Step title="It learns and improves">
    After each conversation, the agent writes structured memory. Anyone on the team can also publish wiki folders to the platform-level **Knowledge Library** (built from repos, files, or URLs) and assign them to agents that need that context. The longer your team works with SlackHive, the sharper everything gets.
  </Step>
</Steps>

---

## What's included

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Coach" icon="comments" href="/agents/coach">
    An interactive chat panel that tunes your agent's system prompt, skills, and knowledge. You describe what you want - Coach proposes concrete changes, you approve.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Persona Library" icon="users" href="/agents/personas">
    26 research-backed starter personas covering engineering, data, product, ops, marketing, and support roles - ready to deploy.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Boss Orchestration" icon="sitemap" href="/agents/boss-agents">
    A Boss agent receives high-level requests and delegates to specialists via Slack thread @mentions. Specialists report back, and Boss consolidates results.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Knowledge Library" icon="book" href="/agents/knowledge-base">
    A shared, platform-level catalog of wiki folders. Owners ingest repos, files, and URLs into Karpathy-style LLM wikis; assign one folder to many agents.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Persistent Memory" icon="brain" href="/agents/memory">
    Agents write structured memories during every session. Memories compound - the longer an agent works with your team, the sharper it gets.
  </Card>
  <Card title="MCP Tool Servers" icon="plug" href="/configuration/mcp-servers">
    Connect agents to Notion, Jira, GitHub, Figma, and more via MCP. Global catalog with Official / Community badges; one-click import from Claude Code CLI.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Test Mode" icon="flask" href="/agents/testing">
    A sandboxed conversation pane with real MCPs and multi-agent delegation - iterate without sending anything to Slack.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Version History" icon="clock-rotate-left" href="/features/history">
    Every save auto-snapshots the full agent state. Browse history with GitHub-style file diffs and restore any version with one click.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Activity Dashboard" icon="wave-pulse" href="/features/activity">
    Live kanban of every task your agents are working on - Active, Completed, Errors - with drill-down to every MCP tool call. A superadmin-only Usage tab breaks down token consumption per agent and ranks power users. Scoped by role.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Hot Reload" icon="bolt">
    Edit any agent - instructions, skills, tools, permissions - and changes take effect within seconds. No restarts, no downtime.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Encrypted Secrets" icon="lock">
    A platform-level encrypted store for API keys and Slack tokens. Credentials are never exposed in the API or UI.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Access Control" icon="shield" href="/features/users">
    Four roles - superadmin, admin, editor, viewer - with per-agent grants. All permissions enforced server-side.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Dark Mode" icon="moon">
    Toggle in the profile menu. Runs across the whole dashboard.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Claude Status" icon="signal">
    A live badge on the dashboard header shows whether Claude Code is connected, where the token came from (file / Keychain / env), and when it expires. Auto-refreshes from Keychain on macOS.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

---

## Under the hood

SlackHive runs two local processes:

| Service | What it does |
|---|---|
| **Web** (Next.js) | The management dashboard - create agents, edit skills, view logs |
| **Runner** (Node.js) | Hosts all agent processes and maintains their Slack connections |

State is stored in a local SQLite database at `~/.slackhive/data.db`. One command (`slackhive start` / `slackhive stop`) manages the whole stack.

<Note>
  SlackHive agents are powered by **Claude Code**. Each agent is a real AI agent with tools, memory, and instructions — full read/write/exec capability through MCP, not a thin wrapper around a model. Works with a Claude Pro or Max subscription, or a standard API key.
</Note>

---

## The four layers of an agent's brain

Every SlackHive agent has four places content can live. Getting the mental model right up front saves a lot of trial-and-error later:

| Layer | Purpose |
|---|---|
| **System Prompt** | Who the agent is - role, tone, hard rules. Loads every turn. |
| **Skills** | Reusable procedures invoked as slash commands. Loads on demand. |
| **Memory** | Facts the agent learned from conversations. Recalled when relevant. |
| **Wiki** | Shared reference material from the platform Knowledge Library — folders the agent is assigned (codebases, docs, URLs). |

See [Concepts - What Goes Where](/agents/concepts) for the decision matrix - it's the best first read after this page.

---

## Get started

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Quick Start" icon="rocket" href="/quickstart">
    From zero to your first agent responding in Slack - in under 10 minutes.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Install with the CLI" icon="terminal" href="/getting-started/install-cli">
    The one-command install path.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Concepts" icon="diagram-project" href="/agents/concepts">
    What goes where — system prompt vs skills vs memory vs Knowledge Library.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Create an Agent" icon="robot" href="/agents/creating-agents">
    Walk through the 5-step agent wizard.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Example Agents" icon="sparkles" href="/examples">
    Ten ready-to-build setups - oncall triage, data analyst, birthday bot, and more.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>
