Vercel Labs 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