Why we open sourced our Slack agent (and what we learned about the AI coworker space)

We open sourced Centaur last month—a Slack agent we built for our own investing and engineering work. Over the past few months it's grown to 100-150 daily power users across a few organizations, handling both judgment-heavy tasks like investment research and raw horsepower work like searching massive codebases.

The interesting part isn't just our internal use. We've been running a small Slack Connect with external orgs using it, and the feedback has been consistent: most SaaS tools don't cut it because companies need too much customization and their critical integrations aren't supported out of the box.

Our roadmap is getting clearer as we tackle the tricky parts of multi-org collaboration. We're working on scoping Slackbot access by channel, which would finally let different organizations' agents coexist safely in the same space—almost like an Enterprise Matrixbook. But the real challenge isn't the vision, it's execution. Keeping costs low while staying self-hostable for smaller teams has forced us to rethink everything. The hard problems only become obvious once you're deep in the implementation.

That said, I do think Slack has won in one sense: it's the best place for a coworker agent to emerge, rather than a standalone application. Curious whether others are seeing this pattern too.