agentchannels

Agent Channels

Agent Channels (ach) is a CLI that bridges your communicatino channels, such as Slack, to agents like Claude Managed Agents. Mention the bot in any channel or DM and each thread becomes a multi-turn streaming session with your agent — tools, vaults, and all.

Agent Channels is right for you if

• ✅ You've built (or want to build) a Claude Managed Agent and need to put it in front of a team
• ✅ You want to build agents once and provide them across multiple channels
• ✅ You want to provide your agents to your colleagues through Slack, without building a separate app for them
• ✅ You don't want to build messy connectors between agents and communication channels yourself
• ✅ You want multi-turn conversations per thread, not one-shot Q&A bots
• ✅ You want streaming responses that appear in real time, not 30-second waits for a wall of text

Quick Start

Set up a Claude Managed Agent on Slack in three commands:

# Install
brew install agentchannels/tap/ach

# Set up agent, environment, vault, and Slack app — one interactive wizard
ach init slack

# Start the bot
ach serve

That's it. ach init slack selects or creates your Claude Managed Agent and Environment, optionally links a Vault, configures your Slack app, and writes everything to .env. Then ach serve picks it all up automatically.

Prefer Claude Code? Install the plugin (see Installation below), then run /agentchannels:init-slack and /agentchannels:serve inside Claude Code. Jump to Use from Claude Code for details.

Installation

claude plugin marketplace add agentchannels/agentchannels
claude plugin install agentchannels@agentchannels

brew install agentchannels/tap/ach

npm install -g agentchannels

npx agentchannels init slack
npx agentchannels serve

git clone https://github.com/anthropics/agentchannels.git
cd agentchannels
pnpm install && pnpm build
pnpm link --global

Prerequisites

• Anthropic API key with Managed Agents access — console.anthropic.com
• Slack workspace where you can create apps

Configuration

agentchannels splits its configuration in two:

• .env holds secrets — your Anthropic API key and Slack tokens.
• agentchannels.config.ts describes the agent backend — which Claude Managed Agent to talk to, or any other Backend implementation you wire up. The ach init slack wizard generates this file for you.

Environment variables (.env)

Agent config (agentchannels.config.ts)

The wizard scaffolds something like:

import {
  defineConfig,
  ManagedAgentBackend,
  BackendRegistry,
} from "agentchannels";

const registry = new BackendRegistry();

export default defineConfig({
  resolveBackend: (ctx) =>
    registry.resolve(
      ctx.threadKey,
      () =>
        new ManagedAgentBackend({
          clientConfig: { apiKey: process.env.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY ?? "" },
          agentId: "agent_…",
          environmentId: "env_…",
        }),
    ),
});

Pass --config <path> to ach serve to point at a different file.

See Backend interface below for how to plug in a custom Backend (e.g. a local Claude CLI process) instead of ManagedAgentBackend.

CLI Reference

ach init slack

Interactive wizard that handles complete setup in one flow: