slack-usage_skill

Overview

This skill helps you find and retrieve Slack conversations quickly and reliably. It prioritizes message search across the workspace and falls back to channel history only when specifically requested. It’s designed for safe, rate-aware access to messages, threads, and metadata using available Slack tokens.

How this skill works

When asked to find messages, the skill runs a workspace-wide search first to locate relevant messages across channels, users, and dates. If you request recent channel history explicitly, it fetches the latest messages from that channel. It returns message text, timestamps, thread replies, and basic metadata while respecting rate limits and token permissions.

When to use it

• Search Slack for messages about a topic or keyword across the workspace
• Find what a specific person said in any channel
• Retrieve recent messages from a single channel when explicitly requested
• Get thread replies and full context for a message
• Locate past discussions filtered by date, channel, or user

Best practices

• Always run the workspace search function first for broad results; use channel history only for recent local context
• Use a user-level token for full search coverage; a bot token works for channels the bot is in
• Rate-limit bulk requests (space requests ~1s apart) and implement retry/backoff on rate-limit errors
• Cache search results when repeated queries are expected to reduce API calls
• Format mentions, channels, and links using Slack markup when composing messages or references
• Reply in threads to preserve channel cleanliness and fetch thread replies when you need full context

Example use cases

• "Find Slack messages about Q2 budget" across all channels and include thread replies
• "What did Alice say about the deploy on Jan 12?" — search by user and date
• Retrieve recent history for #ops when troubleshooting an incident
• Pull the discussion thread for a message so you can quote full context in a ticket
• Monitor a channel’s recent activity to summarize updates for stakeholders