I spoke with a (potentially biased) member of technical staff @ Anthropic today who claimed that tags w/ multi-player capability is the biggest thing they've shipped since Claude Code.
Effort wise probably, but Slack is... not where everyone is... So it seems underwhelming, this is a win for non-devs I supposed, what would have made this more fascinating is if this was a follow up to Claude Design, which in my opinion could have been as big as Claude Code, or even bigger, but it has its own token usage that burned so quickly, not sure how much of general token usage it takes now though.
Or even Cowork, aim it at non-technical roles. Back and forth chat within a team to collaborate on documents, files, excel sheets, etc.
Although I suppose the problem with doing it for Cowork is this is a slack plugin, and that is not where most non-tech companies are. Teams is, at 320+ million active users vs. ~50 million.
Everyone hates Teams, but like or not that is where enterprise work happens, not slack. Anthropic would do well to make their Microsoft 365/Teams integration story better and go after enterprise before OpenAI does, or before Microsoft catches up (if they ever do) with Copilot.
I wouldn't call this minor. The 2 big features seem to be integrated memory + ambient proactiveness. This requires pretty intense tuning to not be annoying.
I suppose. But we don't see the rewrite. That's for you.
I think that people see the word "claude" and smash the upvote button. I don't think it's botted. My guess is that people just want another place where they can discuss ai coding workflows.
It's interesting to hear that 60% of PRs at Anthropic is created by the Slack bot. While building a Slack bot is easy, making it look like an AI teammate is pretty hard. This is exactly the gap we’re working on with Lobu.ai — disclosure: I’m the founder.
The hard problem is giving a shared agent durable organizational memory and a real isolated environment where it can safely access company systems and perform work. The agents need a durable log of what everybody at the company is doing, prevent data leaks with proper access control and isolate the runtime to give everybody both private & shared space.
It’s also not tied to Claude or Slack. We see Slack as one interface and the models as part of the harness. It's usually better to combine multiple providers to review the work.
The most important difference from other products:
> @Claude is multiplayer. Within a given Slack channel, there’s one Claude that interacts with everyone. This means that anyone can see what it’s working on, and can pick up the conversation from where the last person left off. This makes tagging Claude very different from working within a single chat or for a single task—it’s much more like interacting collaboratively with a teammate.
We have the opposite problem. We've tried this slack integration (first with NanoClaw, then Hermes, but now just building our own), and we actually want the OPPOSITE.
In private context, I want to have a per-person conversation with durable context for that person's private chats. I also want that person's permissions to extend. Like contractors in our slack should only be able to ask and get back information about clients that they've been attached to, not our entire knowledgeable.
And we've implemented ALL that, but just with a lot of custom code. We've put in interceptors that put in per-user keys into the MCP connection so only certain tools are even exposed, etc.
Hopefully there is some sort of version history implemented or planned like they have in Cowork[0]... this sounds great until a co-worker hijacks your Claude session with a worse idea and derails it from what you were intending.
[0] "Editing this message will create a new conversation branch. You can switch between branches using the arrow navigation buttons."
I don't think that that's quite what the parent commenter had in mind.
From reading that and materials on it, it seems unclear if – let's say you do what's done in the demos on the site and 'dispatch work' from a thread in a shared channel (e.g. from some discussion) – that if any one of your coworkers replies below you and says, "Actually, could you fold in <blah> as well?" that Claude wouldn't listen to them and thus derail the work.
Yeah, there is a level of organizational trust that is required to use this tool (as with any system that allows distributing access via service accounts).
We do signal to Claude that there's a difference between a conversation's initiator versus incoming participants and we've found that in situations where people disagree on an approach, Claude patiently waits for a resolution while correcting any misunderstandings.
It's also worth mentioning that since Claude has its own identity, a coworker cannot enter a thread and commandeer _your_ identity; you collectively steer how Claude acts with its _own_ identity (it opens PRs as itself, browses Datadog as itself, etc).
Thats a double-edged sword in some scenarios. If you're trying to keep info private then feeding it into a shared agent basically means that you can't guarantee that privacy. I'd imagine the approach here would be to have separate agents for private data and then restrict Slack access, but I could imagine tons of accidents from managers that habitually @Claude without understanding the implications.
Every channel has its own Claude, and Claude's access is configurable per-channel and per-workspace. Private channels don't leak information to other channels
Is someone here using a Claude product that's not code? I'm puzzled about the amount of products they put out. I know a lot of people using Claude but we're all using the terminal-based code. Even for non-engineering stuff it suits great (tax documents, 3D modeling with blender through MCP, academic research, etc.)
At my work we rolled out Cowork to all the non-technical staff. People are using a ton, wired up for read access to M365, Confluence, etc. as sort of a psuedo enterprise RAG + all the document creation/file management it can do.
I know my users would actually like Claude Tag, but unfortunately we are in Teams, not Slack, as are most other non-tech companies.
Cowork/Claude Desktop itself is also quite a frustrating product. There's no native audit log unless you basically wire up your own with the API & a log aggregator. You can't selectively enable Claude Code access per team member, it's all or nothing. Some of the MCP connections (like QuickBooks Online) don't do RBAC at all, it's all or nothing for every user in the team.
Maybe enterprise isn't their target market, but they do keep making features that make it seem like they want that market. But if they do, they really need to step up work on governance features & RBAC for specific features and settings per member in the team.
If they don't, Microsoft will eat their lunch for enterprise non-programming use.
I use Claude Desktop (& essentially equivalent mobile app) to ask frivolous aspie questions about things society long ago accepted. I enjoy its responses, interpret how you wlll. (my claude.md file has instructions to tell it that the premise of any question i ask is as likely as not wrong, and to never be sycophantic).
But beware the userMemories file (ask Claude to give you a dump of it). bonus points if you can figure out where that file lives.
At first I was freaked out that usermemories is a subpoena’able psychological profile on me. Then I realized that the same file will be produced for spooks all over Langley, so that the day Anthropic gets hacked those profiles will see the light of day (caveat along with the rest of the user base of course) and so I felt more catharsis as a result.
And it sometimes feels like these teams are not talking to each other. Using Claude Design? The way to hand it over to Claude Code is to download a .zip file with the html mockup and some description, which you then have to copy into Claude Code so it can use it.
The latest version of Claude code as of yesterday or day before has Claude design Mcp so you don’t need to do this now.
edit: note this may not be official release, and may be unavailable for some users. I saw it show up yesterday listed as available Mcp and used it to view projects in Claude design.
This happened at Google because there aren’t enough engineers to maintain all these services. This situation may not apply to Anthropic, as they can set up features to be maintained in perpetuity by Claude.
They are going after the non-developer side of the business. Many developers are far less sticky and want to try out different harnesses and models. Case in point, our biz team all has Claude Desktop / Enterprise, developers get choice and there are a lot of setups.
To go after the non-developer side though they need to do a ton more work on governance & RBAC. It's sorely lacking for anything more than a tech company/startup team. You can't even selectively enable or disable Cowork & Claude Code per member on the team plan, it's all or nothing for everyone in the team.
Is this still using Claude Web sessions? Also, has anyone used Claude Web environments to do anything besides stuff with repo access? Like running real environments? SSHing into anything more super powered? Anyone putting real creds into those environments?
yeah. exactly. they have these "self-hosted sandboxes" which seems to be the unlock we'd need. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/managed-agents/self-host... but those only seem available to their "managed agents" so like "scheduled prompts" i think. one day i assume they'll merge Claude Web sessions with these self-sandboxes maybe
Cursor has had this a while, integrated with their web agents. It was a bit buggy to begin with, not working well with non-github repos, but it was improving last time I checked and was pretty decent.
The best part for me is seeing non-technical folk spec out something in a thread that they discussed something and letting the agent go ahead and build it ready for the humans to review later.
Slack is such a simple product, and is so strategic as an interface for AI, Anthropic has to be considering building their own Slack. Hopefully this tag approach is an MVP and it proves the potential of workplace messaging as an interface for AI, but also the limitations of relying on the extension points they salesforce chooses to provide, and it turns into a full fledged slack competitor from anthropic soon.
Nothing, and integration in a chat app would be better served being model agnostic. Anthropic's slack bot here is also at a disadvantage being slack only. 90% of F500 companies are on Teams, not slack. If their only goal is tech companies and startups, fine, but if they intend to grow usage beyond that it needs to be chat app agnostic.
Not Claude but we have AI agents operating like that already. We have 10 different ones actually all deployed in Slack and accessible via DM, or in a shared team chat.
The difference between this and our agents is that they are context aware - i.e. you can use them privately to access personal information safely.
I’d be curious how they’ve solved the attribution/provenance/identity problem here. Are instances of Claude Tag, across channels, sharing the same identity? Can I grant one instance access to a range of AWS roles and another instance access to other roles?
During an incident, how do I know which Claude Tag called AWS?
> Think of it as creating separate Claude identities for different uses: everything, including its memories, will stay scoped to the channels defined by the administrators. For example, a model set up for sales work won’t pass on memories to one set up for engineering; nor will it give engineers access to any sales data or tools. More information about provisioning access is available here (https://claude.com/blog/agent-identity-access-model).
I actually think that "multiplayer" AI usage is very neat I've done a few things where I made a simple telegram wrapper and me alongside a couple of other people were prompting it at the same time to improve a website design / ux. But definitely not whatever the hell this is, how can anthropic make products so much worse when presumeably having access to infinite fable/mythos.
Given the reliability and general product quality of the Anthropic product team's code, this doesn't sound like a selling point.
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#company-brain
Although I suppose the problem with doing it for Cowork is this is a slack plugin, and that is not where most non-tech companies are. Teams is, at 320+ million active users vs. ~50 million.
Everyone hates Teams, but like or not that is where enterprise work happens, not slack. Anthropic would do well to make their Microsoft 365/Teams integration story better and go after enterprise before OpenAI does, or before Microsoft catches up (if they ever do) with Copilot.
I think that people see the word "claude" and smash the upvote button. I don't think it's botted. My guess is that people just want another place where they can discuss ai coding workflows.
Yeah, that explains a lot.
The hard problem is giving a shared agent durable organizational memory and a real isolated environment where it can safely access company systems and perform work. The agents need a durable log of what everybody at the company is doing, prevent data leaks with proper access control and isolate the runtime to give everybody both private & shared space.
It’s also not tied to Claude or Slack. We see Slack as one interface and the models as part of the harness. It's usually better to combine multiple providers to review the work.
https://lobu.ai https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu
> @Claude is multiplayer. Within a given Slack channel, there’s one Claude that interacts with everyone. This means that anyone can see what it’s working on, and can pick up the conversation from where the last person left off. This makes tagging Claude very different from working within a single chat or for a single task—it’s much more like interacting collaboratively with a teammate.
In private context, I want to have a per-person conversation with durable context for that person's private chats. I also want that person's permissions to extend. Like contractors in our slack should only be able to ask and get back information about clients that they've been attached to, not our entire knowledgeable.
And we've implemented ALL that, but just with a lot of custom code. We've put in interceptors that put in per-user keys into the MCP connection so only certain tools are even exposed, etc.
[0] "Editing this message will create a new conversation branch. You can switch between branches using the arrow navigation buttons."
From reading that and materials on it, it seems unclear if – let's say you do what's done in the demos on the site and 'dispatch work' from a thread in a shared channel (e.g. from some discussion) – that if any one of your coworkers replies below you and says, "Actually, could you fold in <blah> as well?" that Claude wouldn't listen to them and thus derail the work.
We do signal to Claude that there's a difference between a conversation's initiator versus incoming participants and we've found that in situations where people disagree on an approach, Claude patiently waits for a resolution while correcting any misunderstandings.
It's also worth mentioning that since Claude has its own identity, a coworker cannot enter a thread and commandeer _your_ identity; you collectively steer how Claude acts with its _own_ identity (it opens PRs as itself, browses Datadog as itself, etc).
I know my users would actually like Claude Tag, but unfortunately we are in Teams, not Slack, as are most other non-tech companies.
Cowork/Claude Desktop itself is also quite a frustrating product. There's no native audit log unless you basically wire up your own with the API & a log aggregator. You can't selectively enable Claude Code access per team member, it's all or nothing. Some of the MCP connections (like QuickBooks Online) don't do RBAC at all, it's all or nothing for every user in the team.
Maybe enterprise isn't their target market, but they do keep making features that make it seem like they want that market. But if they do, they really need to step up work on governance features & RBAC for specific features and settings per member in the team.
If they don't, Microsoft will eat their lunch for enterprise non-programming use.
edit: note this may not be official release, and may be unavailable for some users. I saw it show up yesterday listed as available Mcp and used it to view projects in Claude design.
I expect many of those to be shut down sooner than later, if learning anything from Google.
The best part for me is seeing non-technical folk spec out something in a thread that they discussed something and letting the agent go ahead and build it ready for the humans to review later.
The difference between this and our agents is that they are context aware - i.e. you can use them privately to access personal information safely.
Can provide a link if interested.
During an incident, how do I know which Claude Tag called AWS?
> Think of it as creating separate Claude identities for different uses: everything, including its memories, will stay scoped to the channels defined by the administrators. For example, a model set up for sales work won’t pass on memories to one set up for engineering; nor will it give engineers access to any sales data or tools. More information about provisioning access is available here (https://claude.com/blog/agent-identity-access-model).
AI enables quick shipping, but the traditional moat of development no longer applies.
Devin is model agnostic, and isn't Slack only.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641261
A tiny detail...
That explains a lot.
I'm still using it all the time and getting an immense benefit.