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The AI Power-Worker Series ③ Building a Slack Bot: A Bot That Sends Deadlines and Reports Automatically

AASAP
2026-06-15 · 4 min read

A Slack bot is a little helper that automatically posts messages — like deadline alerts or daily reports — to a designated channel on your behalf, and you can build one in five steps even without knowing code: ① why you need a bot, ② create a Slack app and issue a token, ③ set up .env, ④ send messages via a prompt, and ⑤ put it to real use. Since it applies the same "keys in .env, connection via prompt" method from Part 1 directly to Slack, once you set up a recurring alert just once, it runs hands-free.

1. Why Do You Need a Slack Bot?

A Slack bot is a program that automatically sends a message when a defined condition is met, taking over the alerts a person used to handle by hand every time. It's not a chatbot you talk to directly in chat, but more like an errand-runner instructed to "send this message to this channel in this situation."

In a work setting, it's used like this:

In short, a Slack bot is an automatic assistant that makes the system proactively notify you of "the things you used to miss because you forgot to check."

2. Creating a Slack App (Bot) and Issuing a Token

For a Slack bot, you create an app on the Slack API page, grant the bot permission to send messages, and install it to your workspace — at which point a token is issued. This token plays the role of the "API key" you learned about in Part 1.

The steps are as follows:

  1. On the Slack API page, click "Create New App" to create an app (choose From scratch).
  2. Under "OAuth & Permissions," add chat:write to the bot permissions (Bot Token Scopes).
  3. Install it via "Install to Workspace," and a Bot User OAuth Token starting with xoxb- is issued.
  4. Go into the channel where you'll send messages and invite the bot (in the channel, type /invite @botname).

The issued xoxb- token is essentially the bot's access pass, so don't post it anywhere public.

3. Setting Up `.env`

Save the issued bot token and the channel to send to in the .env file in your project folder. It's exactly the method covered in Part 1.

SLACK_BOT_TOKEN=xoxb-your-issued-token
SLACK_CHANNEL=#team-channel-name

Then add .env to .gitignore so the token doesn't leak out. Once you've separated it this way, in the next step you only need to instruct the AI to "send messages using the token in .env."

4. Sending Messages via a Prompt

Once the keys are ready, hand the actual sending code off to an AI like Claude Code via a prompt. Describe what to send and to which channel, and the AI will produce code that reads the token from .env and sends the message to Slack. For example, you'd request:

Using SLACK_BOT_TOKEN from .env, write code that sends a nicely formatted
list of today's deadlines to the SLACK_CHANNEL channel,
with the title "Today's Work Briefing ☀️."
Don't write the token in the code — read it from .env.

By spelling out "what to send + which channel + read the token from .env" like this, the bot posts the message to the designated channel. Once you've confirmed it works, you can reuse it for various alerts by just changing the content to send.

5. Putting It to Real Use and Going Further

Connect this bot to the news monitoring from Part 2, and it becomes an automatic report that delivers a competitor-news summary to your team's Slack every morning. Just carry over the previous installment's output, as in: "Send the news summary I built in Part 2 via the Slack bot at 9 a.m. every day."

Schedule this to run automatically at 9 a.m. on weekdays.
When it runs, build a competitor-news summary and send it to the Slack channel,
and when it's done, print "Sent" to the console.

Once you hand off scheduled execution (a scheduler) too, the alerts arrive on time without anyone turning anything on. That said, since automatic sending involves a token and permissions, it's safer to check the results yourself the first few times before handing it over to automation. In the next installment, Part 4, we'll build a "work dashboard" that gathers these alerts, news, and metrics onto a single screen.

References: Slack API Documentation · Claude Code Official Documentation

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