David Cramer builds Slackbot outperforming vendor AI agents
David Cramer posted that vendor-specific tools such as the Sentry agent and the Linear agent inside Slack handle only isolated tasks. He described an internal Slackbot connected to Sentry, GitHub, Linear, Notion and other platforms that managed cross-tool workflows more effectively. Subsequent posts in the thread reinforced the same point, contrasting generalized agents such as Devin with narrow vendor chatbots and attributing the performance difference to breadth of system access.
@benhylak Yeah Devin is pretty good
ben hylak@benhylaki think this will just be devin
#1858ben hylak@BENHYLAKi think this will just devin
David Cramer@zeegvendor-specific chatbots are broken by design that means the Sentry agent, the Linear agent, and any others you might have in Slack they are fine for some point situations, they're nice to get started with, but agents with generalized access outperform them in every single scenario some weeks ago we built an internal Slackbot, gave it access to a bunch of systems (Sentry, GitHub, Linear, Notion, etc), and its capabilities overnight far exceed these other bots "Oh cool Linear can now search your code bases" - our bot did that on day one, and then could push that information wherever it needed to go. Its useful to the point where I now discourage use of things like the Linear bot because it _creates worse outcomes_. this also goes beyond the simple generalization of access: we can customize it. we throw in skills-as-runbooks, templates, etc and the outcomes once again incrementally improve if your org hasnt already built a general purpose bot internally you should. if you need inspiration ours is open source on GitHub (albeit fairly unstable still) https://github.com/getsentry/junior
#1858ben hylak@BENHYLAKi think this will just be devin
David Cramer@zeegvendor-specific chatbots are broken by design that means the Sentry agent, the Linear agent, and any others you might have in Slack they are fine for some point situations, they're nice to get started with, but agents with generalized access outperform them in every single scenario some weeks ago we built an internal Slackbot, gave it access to a bunch of systems (Sentry, GitHub, Linear, Notion, etc), and its capabilities overnight far exceed these other bots "Oh cool Linear can now search your code bases" - our bot did that on day one, and then could push that information wherever it needed to go. Its useful to the point where I now discourage use of things like the Linear bot because it _creates worse outcomes_. this also goes beyond the simple generalization of access: we can customize it. we throw in skills-as-runbooks, templates, etc and the outcomes once again incrementally improve if your org hasnt already built a general purpose bot internally you should. if you need inspiration ours is open source on GitHub (albeit fairly unstable still) https://github.com/getsentry/junior
#1984Tenobrus@TENOBRUSabsolutely 100% true
David Cramer@zeegvendor-specific chatbots are broken by design that means the Sentry agent, the Linear agent, and any others you might have in Slack they are fine for some point situations, they're nice to get started with, but agents with generalized access outperform them in every single scenario some weeks ago we built an internal Slackbot, gave it access to a bunch of systems (Sentry, GitHub, Linear, Notion, etc), and its capabilities overnight far exceed these other bots "Oh cool Linear can now search your code bases" - our bot did that on day one, and then could push that information wherever it needed to go. Its useful to the point where I now discourage use of things like the Linear bot because it _creates worse outcomes_. this also goes beyond the simple generalization of access: we can customize it. we throw in skills-as-runbooks, templates, etc and the outcomes once again incrementally improve if your org hasnt already built a general purpose bot internally you should. if you need inspiration ours is open source on GitHub (albeit fairly unstable still) https://github.com/getsentry/junior