Compare · A Slack bot wired to an LLM
For the team
Where does the answer in the thread come from?
In Slack the two look identical: a mention, a short wait, a reply in the thread. The difference is what was read before the reply was written — documents, or the code itself, at a commit the answer names.
A bot wired to an LLM
PRCHD
What a footed answer looks like
The footer says exactly what was read.
It names the project, the commit, the branch, and the mode the answer was read under, so anyone in the thread can check it — and nobody has to ask how current it is.
- The question reaches the agent exactly as it was typed
- Act mode: it read the checkout and wrote nothing to disk
- A follow-up mention in the same thread continues the same session
- In a private channel enabled for runs, the same host can go further and leave a branch
@PRCHD do we still send the welcome email when someone signs up from an invite link?
eyes · PRCHD
Working on it…
No. An invite-link signup takes the accept path in invites/accept_service.rb, which marks the account onboarded and never enqueues the welcome mailer. Only the self-serve signup path sends it.
Both paths used to send it. That changed in the invites rework, six weeks ago.
Same thread. Different source.
| A Slack bot wired to an LLM | PRCHD | |
|---|---|---|
| What it reads | Documents, pages, and past messages | The project’s working tree, in its own checkout |
| How current the answer is | As current as the last sync of those documents | As current as the checkout — and it names the commit |
| Can it run the tests | No | Yes, in a Work-mode recipe, and it reports what happened |
| Can it reach the tracker or the crash reporter | Whatever it was wired to | Whatever the agent CLI on that computer is configured to reach |
| What it can leave behind | A message | A message, a filed ticket, or a branch to review |
| Where the answer is produced | The bot vendor’s infrastructure | The computer the team installed PRCHD on |
Where a document bot is better
Most of what a company knows lives outside the repository.
A document bot does each of these better, and each is a good reason for a team to keep both.
- It answers about everything
Policies, meeting notes, design decisions, last quarter’s plan. Most of what a company knows never became a repository, and PRCHD reads one project at a time.
- It replies in seconds
An agent reading real code takes longer. One “working on it”, then the answer edits itself in — and a long run looks quiet while it is thinking.
- Nothing has to stay awake
A hosted bot has no computer to keep on. A team host does: it answers while that computer is on, and picks up questions asked while it was off when it reconnects.
- Retrieval is its own hard problem
Ranking passages across a large corpus is a real discipline, and something built for it does that better than reading files one at a time.
- Installing it is one click
The PRCHD Slack app is the team’s own custom app, installed into their Slack workspace from a published manifest. Socket Mode apps can’t be listed in the Slack Marketplace, so setup means pasting two tokens.
What reading the real checkout gives you
An answer you can date.
- The project, commit, branch, and mode the answer was read under
- The tests actually run, when the recipe says to run them
- A branch to review when the question turns into work
- The tracker, the crash reporter, and a browser, reached the way that agent already reaches them
- Channel membership as the whole grant — no accounts and no roles to administer
- Runs happen only in private channels the operator enabled, and asking writes nothing to the repository
Where PRCHD sits
Both can live in the same Slack workspace.
If the question is what did we decide, a document is the right source, and something built to search documents will beat PRCHD every time. If the question is what does it do now, the source is the checkout — and PRCHD reads it, in the project root, at a commit it names.
The answer is in the code. Ask it there.
One person installs the host and binds a channel. Everyone else is already in it.