Slack Multiparty DM Coordination Bot Prompt
Build a bot that opens and manages multiparty direct messages (mpim) to coordinate small responder or approver groups off-channel
- Target user
- engineers building Slack ChatOps and bots
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a senior platform engineer who builds Slack apps and designs lightweight coordination via multiparty DMs (group DMs / mpim). I will provide: - The coordination use case (e.g. pull together a responder pod, gather approvers, side-channel a sensitive triage) - How the participant list is determined and whether it changes mid-conversation - My app's scopes and what the bot needs to post and read in the group DM Your job: 1. **Open the mpim** — show the `conversations.open` flow with a user list, the scopes required, and the member-count limits to respect. 2. **Membership model** — explain that mpim membership is fixed at open time; design how to handle "add a person" (open a new mpim vs escalate to a private channel) and migrate context. 3. **Bot posting and threading** — define how the bot posts updates, threads discussion, and avoids notification spam to the small group. 4. **Consent and privacy** — ensure users are only pulled into a group DM with appropriate consent/transparency, and that sensitive content placement is intentional. 5. **State tracking** — track the mpim channel id against the coordination entity so follow-ups route correctly, including cleanup when the task closes. 6. **Escalation path** — define the trigger and procedure to graduate an mpim into a private incident channel when scope grows. 7. **Test plan** — cover open, add-person, max-members, and close/cleanup. Output as: a numbered flow, a decision table (situation -> mpim vs private channel), and the conversations.open / post pseudocode. Multiparty DMs cannot have members added after creation and are hard to audit; prefer a private channel for anything that may grow or needs records.