Anthropic announced on Monday that its new feature Claude Code will be launched in Slack as a research preview, allowing developers to assign complete coding tasks directly within conversation threads. This version is built upon Anthropic's existing Slack integration but marks a more critical step: from simple code suggestions to a full automated workflow covering requirement understanding, code generation, progress synchronization, and submitting pull requests.

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Previously, Claude on Slack mainly played a supporting role, answering code questions, generating small code snippets, or assisting with debugging; now, developers just need to @Claude in the discussion, and the model can automatically read bug reports, feature requests, or background information in the conversation, determine the relevant code repository, and continuously update the progress within the same thread, generating code changes that can be navigated and viewed, even directly assisting in initiating a pull request. Anthropic's move sends out a signal: the next phase of competition for coding assistants lies not in the model, but in the workflow.

This direction aligns closely with industry trends. AI coding assistants are moving from traditional IDEs to the main collaboration scenarios of teams, and engineering communication and code editing are being re-integrated. Cursor already supports writing code and debugging within chat threads through Slack integration; GitHub Copilot has added the ability to generate pull requests directly from conversations; OpenAI's Codex can also enter workspaces through custom Slack bots. As more development processes occur within Slack channels, private chats, and threads, whoever can deeply embed AI into the daily communication of engineering teams may become the new workflow core.

For Slack, this means it is gradually becoming an "AI hub for the workplace." Engineering teams handle requirements, discuss solutions, and report progress every day in Slack, and when coding assistants start performing tasks directly within these scenarios, communication itself becomes actionable development instructions, and the chat interface is being reshaped into a new generation of collaborative development environment.

However, such deep integration also brings new risks. Sensitive access to code repositories must be managed by both Slack and Claude, extending the security audit chain and increasing uncertainty regarding intellectual property protection. Additionally, if Slack or Claude's API experiences failures, delays, or rate limits, the development process that teams previously had full control over may be disrupted.

Although Anthropic has not yet announced the full rollout timeline for Claude Code, one thing is certain: in the competitive AI coding market, the key to differentiation is no longer the model itself, but how deeply and broadly it can be integrated into developers' daily work. The emergence of Claude Code is pushing the entire industry into a new phase—developing within chats and delivering code through collaboration.