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Introducing the Agent messaging experience

Agents now support a new messaging experience, set by your app manifest:

  • Agent messaging experience (agent_view): agent conversations now look & feel the same as a regular direct message. Gone is the history tab and new chat button. Instead, all of your conversations appear in the standard message tab and your agent can respond in-thread.
  • Assistant messaging experience (assistant_view): agent conversations happen in separate Chat and History tabs.

New apps can only use the Agent messaging experience. Apps that already use the Assistant messaging experience can continue to use it for now, but assistant_view will eventually be deprecated, and we'll ask existing apps to migrate to agent_view.

The Agent messaging experience changes the following:

  • Knowing when a user opens a DM: rely on the app_home_opened event to know when a user has actively opened a DM with your app. The assistant_thread_started event no longer indicates this. See Developing an agent for details.
  • Suggested prompts: suggested prompts now live at the top of the Messages tab instead of within threads, and the thread_ts argument is no longer required when agent_view is enabled.
  • Continuing a conversation: after a user sends a new message, calling the assistant.threads.setStatus API method on that thread automatically opens the thread to keep the conversation going.

The Slack CLI v4.4.0, Python SDK v3.43.0, and @slack/web-api@7.18.0 are required to access the Agent View feature.

Already have an app using the Assistant messaging experience? Follow the migration checklist to move to the Agent messaging experience. Read more in the guide to developing agents.