[HN Gopher] Show HN: The Channels SDK - Bring Any Agent to Any C...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: The Channels SDK - Bring Any Agent to Any Channel (Slack,
MS Teams)
Author : davidmckayv
Score : 94 points
Date : 2026-08-06 16:05 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| mikeryan52 wrote:
| Hi folks! I'm one of the engineers working on the Channels SDK.
| This is our first public release. Our emphasis has been on making
| agents act like natural participants in Slack and Teams, while
| letting them generate UI along the way. It's built on top of AG-
| UI, so any agent that emits AG-UI can be brought to Slack or
| Teams.
|
| We've been dogfooding this internally and have seen a surge of
| tiny, task-specific agents enter our channels. A lunchbot agent
| wraps the DoorDash CLI to handle office lunch orders, a pupfood
| agent wraps the Pup and GitHub CLIs to do incident triage, and a
| chadbot generates marketing videos on demand from GitHub PRs.
| We've got even more that compose PostHog, Notion, Linear, and
| other internal tools we use.
|
| I had previously been pretty hot about bringing agents to the
| web, but I'm increasingly convinced that chat interfaces are the
| most natural home for useful agents.
|
| Happy to answer any questions about our approach here!
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| I saw WhatsApp listed but I can't find _how_ the integration
| works?
| mikeryan52 wrote:
| WhatsApp is only supported on the open-source side of the
| SDKs right now. Full support for WhatsApp in the hosted
| service is on the roadmap. Point your agent at
| github.com/copilotkit/copilotkit, where the Channels SDKs
| live, and it should be able to pick it up.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| I like the idea of having a much easier way to integrate with
| all of the chat clients, especially with UI. I've been
| surprised there wasn't a way to do that more easily before
| (even pre AI agent revolution).
|
| Two points of confusion that I wanted to bring up just so you
| know what it was like for me as a new reader: "Copilot" is
| unfortunately an extremely overloaded term right now. Not your
| fault, but I don't know about CopilotKit, so I was trying to
| figure out who really was behind this. (Is it Microsoft? etc) I
| also (like another poster) wondered if I needed your server in
| order to use this. I love the MIT license, but it wasn't clear
| to me if this was just a veneer over a closed-source thing or
| not. I saw in your response that there is a legit open source
| ability to use it, but that wasn't clear.
| chengyongru wrote:
| I dont think it s really open source, the MIT part is just the
| client. The service that actually makes it run is closed and
| license-gated.
| mikeryan52 wrote:
| Not necessarily wrong, but that's just a maturity problem on
| our end right now. We're aiming to take the same approach as
| our web SDKs: it works great for open-source deployments and
| works even better with Enterprise Intelligence. We had some
| back-and-forth over webhook vs. WebSocket in the last two weeks
| that caused some churn on our side.
|
| If you point your agent at our SDKs, they should help you use
| the Slack or Teams adapters directly without leveraging the
| hosted service:
| https://github.com/CopilotKit/CopilotKit/tree/main/packages/...
|
| Delivering AG-UI with generative UI to Slack and Teams should
| work great with the open-source packages. We'll make these
| interfaces better and more intuitive.
| opwizardx wrote:
| Is it like a proprietary wrapper for Vercel's Chat SDK
| (https://github.com/vercel/chat)?
| chandureddyvari wrote:
| From quick glance I don't think so that's the case. copliotkit
| promises ag-ui compatiblity., which means it can work with
| codex cli, mastra, pi, claude agents sdk and other harnesses as
| well (there are ag ui adapters as well). I'm actually
| integrating this with claude agent sdk with ag ui adapter.,
| which i don't think is possible with vercel chat sdk.
| opwizardx wrote:
| I first found out about chat-sdk existence when I was
| upgrading my nanoclaw (its core feature is that it uses
| claude agent sdk under the hood as the harness) to v2 and
| they were migrating to chat-sdk as their base layer for
| supporting different channels.
|
| It was pretty limited thought in terms of what I needed, so I
| had to through it away and build my own telegraf sdk based
| channel implementation for telegram, but that was a while
| ago, I assume they should have evolved a lot from the time I
| last touched it about 3 months ago.
| nathan_tarbert wrote:
| Hey, I'm Nathan, DevRel at CopilotKit. That is a really
| interesting point you are making, and we've heard it a lot.
| One of the reasons this is so powerful is that it uses AG-
| UI as the transport, which enables a lot of flexibility
| depending on your use case. I would love to get your
| feedback if you decide to give it a spin.
| mikeryan52 wrote:
| Not proprietary and not a wrapper. Chat SDK served as
| inspiration, of course, but I think it misses a few hard parts
| of bringing agents to chat interfaces:
|
| - Generative UI in these surfaces needs to be durable. If your
| agent composes a Block Kit or Adaptive Cards interface with
| interactivity, you have to be ready to handle that
| interactivity weeks later. We handle this with our JSX
| renderer.
|
| - Chat interfaces are inherently multiplayer. The worst thing
| you can do is have your agent act like a bot: posting all of
| the time, creating noise, and offering no customization. I
| think Claude Tag nailed the user experience here, and now we
| want to empower developers to create agents with a similar UX
| via open source.
|
| - Truly agent-and-surface agnostic. We're fully powered by AG-
| UI (ag-ui.com), so you can bring any agent into Slack and then
| take that same agent to web or mobile all over the same
| protocol.
| opwizardx wrote:
| Fair on AG-UI, that part is a real difference. But the Chat
| SDK point is a bit overstated: vercel/chat also has a JSX
| card system that renders to Block Kit and Adaptive Cards,
| with button and action handlers and pluggable state backends.
|
| > Chat interfaces are inherently multiplayer.
|
| Both chat and channel sdks support subscribing to threads and
| can control messages that arrive concurrently. In that regard
| it feels like this depends more on the logic of the app
| itself rather than gets defined by the framework/dependency
| it uses.
| davidmckayv wrote:
| OP here. I work with Mike on the SDK, and he covered why we built
| it, so here's how it actually works.
|
| We treat "channel" as one layer with four pieces:
|
| Adapters normalize each platform's webhooks and quirks into a
| single neutral event shape.
|
| Ops owns delivery, ordering and reconnects. The run loop is ack-
| first: post the approval card, ack the delivery, and resume the
| run when the click arrives. That's the reason approvals survive
| retries and process restarts instead of stranding a half-finished
| run.
|
| Rendering is a virtual DOM for chat. JSX compiles to native Block
| Kit or Adaptive Cards. Handler IDs are content hashes rather than
| generated per deploy, so buttons posted last week still resolve
| after you ship.
|
| On top of that a small API: createChannel, threads, tools,
| approvals.
|
| Diagram of the open-source path, since that question came up
| elsewhere in the thread: https://github.com/CopilotKit/channels-
| sdk/blob/main/assets/...
|
| One thing worth being precise about, since licensing is the top
| comment. Intelligence is the backend layer: rich threads (AG-UI),
| memory, learning, analytics, governance. It is self-hosted and it
| does not call out anywhere. And CopilotKit is not an agent. We
| don't make model calls; your agent does, in your infrastructure,
| against whatever provider you already use.
| ChaseRensberger wrote:
| I think this is likely a very good idea. I've thought about the
| idea of channels a lot building https://wingman.actor and I've
| gone back in forth on if channel primitives are a good idea at a
| low level or if existing chat clients are just an already well
| defined utility you shouldn't rewrite.
|
| I think your approach of a unified SDK/data structure around a
| chat that adapts to different clients is a really strong solution
| that probably just gives you the best of both worlds.
| swiftlyTyped wrote:
| Cool stuff!
|
| Btw if you build a wingman AG-UI adapter the Channels SDK would
| just work with it. Nowadays, you can honestly get this done in
| probably less than a day of work --we've got a pretty good
| factory set up with validators and tests, etc.
|
| Happy to help if interested!
| SwellJoe wrote:
| I dread the day when my employer's Slack includes chatbots
| rambling all over it.
| swiftlyTyped wrote:
| Hey all, I'm CEO of CopilotKit, the startup behind AG-UI and the
| Channels SDK. Thanks for the support!
|
| We're pretty excited for this one -- I think channels may soon
| become the 3rd big form factor of LLMs (after Chat, and
| Codex/Claude-Code style agents).
|
| We've worked really hard to to shrink the onboarding setup to a
| single prompt:
|
| "Read https://copilotkit.ai/channels-guide.md and help the user
| build their first channel".
|
| It's literally that easy. Then it will help you create a
| coworker-grade Slack / Teams agent backed by basically any of the
| top agent frameworks and harnesses out there.
|
| Would love to get feedback, especially if you hit any snags
| mrud wrote:
| I have been using eve - https://eve.dev/ recently and it was just
| really nice and well thought out. It also supports TUI, github
| and other non chat channels.
|
| The integration and abstraction with sandboxes, cron etc. is very
| nicely done but you still can self host it.
| mefinsf wrote:
| This is amazing! I love the idea of any agent running on any
| surface and this feels like the next step in that process.
| toplinesoftsys wrote:
| Great idea! I love it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-08-07 04:01 UTC)