Building Slack Agents

★ 9

by vercel-labs · part of vercel-labs/academy-skills

🧩 One of 7 skills in the vercel-labs/academy-skills package — works on its own, and pairs well with its siblings.

This is the playbook your agent receives when the skill activates — you don't need to read it to use the skill, but it's here to audit before installing.

Building Slack Agents

Companion skill for the Building Slack Agents course. Build and deploy a Slack agent on Vercel in a single session.

Commands

`/slack-agents learn`

Start the guided learning loop. Fetches lessons from Academy and drives you through the course.

`/slack-agents new`

Scaffold and deploy a new Slack agent. Five-stage wizard:

Project setup — scaffold from Slack Agent Template, configure LLM provider
Slack app creation — generate customized manifest.json, walk through Slack console
Environment configuration — signing secret, bot token, API keys with validation
Local testing — dev server + ngrok tunnel, test in Slack
Production deployment — deploy to Vercel with env vars configured

`/slack-agents submit`

Evaluate your current implementation against the active lesson's outcomes.

Content source

https://vercel.com/academy/slack-agents.md           → course overview
https://vercel.com/academy/slack-agents/<lesson>.md   → lesson content

Core concepts

Slack Agent Template

Starting point with OAuth, event subscriptions, and signature verification pre-configured.

Workflow DevKit

Durable agent execution: suspend mid-conversation, wait for human approval, resume. Tool calls auto-retry on failure. Responses stream to Slack in real time.

Human-in-the-loop

Built-in approval pattern: agent posts Approve/Reject buttons, workflow pauses (no compute), resumes on click.

AI Gateway

Route to any model via gateway('anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6'). Automatic failovers during provider outages.

Tools

Custom tools connect to your systems: customer records, support tickets, databases. Each tool has a typed schema so the agent knows when and how to use it.

Progress detection

Signal	Stage
Project scaffolded from template	1: Setup
`manifest.json` with correct scopes	2: Slack app
`.env.local` with `SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET` + `SLACK_BOT_TOKEN`	3: Config
Dev server running, ngrok tunnel active	4: Testing
Deployed to Vercel with env vars	5: Production

Teaching guidelines

This is a wizard-heavy skill — guide through external console steps (Slack API, Vercel dashboard)
Validate credentials before moving on (bad tokens waste time)
When opening external URLs, tell the user exactly what to click
Test the bot in Slack before deploying — catching issues locally is faster