a slack channel summary bot that keeps the record

a slack channel summary bot usually does one job: you were away, it tells you what you missed, and the summary is gone by tomorrow. that is useful for catching up. it is useless for remembering. the decision your team argued out in #pricing in march is not in anyone's head by june, and nobody is going to scroll for it.

underway now reads the slack channels you invite it to, back through as much of their history as slack allows, and keeps what it reads. each channel's day becomes one line in your record: who decided, shipped, raised or argued about what. the point is not to catch you up. the point is that the interview knows what happened, so it can ask about it.

what a slack channel summary bot is for, if you are building in public

underway turns your working day into a daily episode by interviewing you about it. the interview is only as good as what it knows. a day note covers what you remembered to type. github covers what shipped. your calendar covers who you met. slack is where the rest happened: the thread that went quiet, the customer complaint someone pasted in, the call that got decided in six messages.

so the summary is not for you to read. it is for the interviewer to read before it asks you anything. "the payments thread in #eng went quiet on tuesday, where did that land?" is a better question than "what did you work on?", and it is only possible if something was reading #eng.

how it works

• add underway to slack from account, connections (or from the head start screen when you set up your series). if you added it before 12 october 2026, the card says add to slack again: press it once to give it permission to read channels.
• in slack, open a channel and type /invite @underway. it only ever reads channels you invite it to, public or private.
• from then on, every message in the channel is read as it is posted. it also reads back through the channel's history, a little at a time, as far as slack allows. on a free slack workspace that is the last 90 days; on a paid one it goes back further.
• each channel's day is written as one plain line, in your context under conversations, unticked. tick it and the interview asks about it. setup reads all of it when it suggests what to film.
• the co-host and ask the vault read the same record, so "what did we decide about pricing in march?" has an answer.

why it keeps everything

a summary that expires is a summary that cannot help the episode you film in six months. the whole format is serial: episode 80 is better when the interviewer knows what happened in episode 12. so the messages are kept for as long as your account exists, and the line per day is what the interview reads. delete your account and it is all deleted with it.

what it never does

it never posts in your channels. it never reads a channel you did not invite it to. nothing from slack becomes footage or goes on your public page: other people's words are context for your questions, the same rule as meeting transcripts. the answer is always yours, to camera. take @underway out of a channel and it stops reading it.

the summaries are facts, not opinions: who said what, what was decided, what is still open. if a day in a channel was only chatter, its line says so in a few words.

the limit worth knowing

slack lets an app like underway read history at a fixed pace, fifteen messages a minute per workspace. that is about twenty thousand messages a day, so most channels are read back within a day or two of being invited. the slack card shows each channel, how far back it has been read, and how many messages are kept.