Skip to content

Slack: long responses appear abruptly instead of streaming progressively #414

@Joseph19820124

Description

@Joseph19820124

Problem

When the agent produces a long response in Slack, the message appears all at once — typically dumping ~50 lines of text in a single update. There is no progressive / streaming display, which makes the experience feel jarring and unresponsive compared to how most modern AI chat interfaces work.

Expected Behavior

Long responses should stream incrementally — either by updating the message in small chunks as content is generated, or by appending text progressively — so the user gets a smooth, real-time sense of the agent "thinking" and writing.

Current Behavior

The full response appears in one abrupt jump. No intermediate updates are shown while the agent is generating content.

Why It Matters

  • It looks like the bot is frozen, then suddenly floods the channel
  • Hard to follow for long outputs (code blocks, step-by-step instructions, etc.)
  • Feels significantly less polished compared to the Discord experience

Possible Approaches

  • Use Slack's API to progressively edit the message as chunks arrive
  • Show a typing indicator / placeholder while streaming, then replace with final content
  • Batch updates at a reasonable cadence (e.g. every 500ms) to avoid Slack rate limits

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions