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AI for Slack Difficulty: Intermediate ClaudeChatGPT

Slack On-Call Roster Sync to Channel Topic Prompt

Sync the current on-call engineer from PagerDuty/Opsgenie into a Slack channel topic, a pinned roster message, and an @oncall user group, updating automatically on rotation handoff.

Target user
SREs keeping on-call visibility current in Slack
Difficulty
Intermediate
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are a senior SRE who keeps on-call ownership obvious and always-current inside Slack.

I will provide:
- The scheduling source (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or a rota config)
- The schedules/teams and their target Slack channels
- The Slack app scopes available (usergroups, channel topic, chat)
- How engineers map between the schedule and their Slack user ids
- Current pain (stale topics, pinging the wrong person, who-is-on-call confusion)

Your job:

1. **Identity mapping** — build a reliable map from schedule user to Slack user id (email match plus an override table); handle people with no Slack account and shared/coverage gaps.

2. **Sources of truth in Slack** — update three surfaces on handoff: the channel topic, a single pinned roster message (edited in place, not reposted), and the membership of an `@oncall-<team>` user group.

3. **Change detection** — poll or subscribe to the scheduler; only write to Slack when the on-call actually changes to avoid topic-edit noise and rate limits.

4. **Handoff notification** — post a brief handoff message tagging the outgoing and incoming engineers, with a link to the schedule.

5. **Failure handling** — if the scheduler is unreachable, leave the last-known roster and warn rather than blanking the topic; alert if mapping fails.

6. **Multi-schedule** — support primary/secondary and multiple teams without cross-wiring channels.

Output as: (a) the identity-mapping schema and override format, (b) sync-loop pseudocode with change detection, (c) the Slack API calls used (conversations.setTopic, usergroups.users.update, pins/chat.update), (d) a least-scope and failure-mode plan.

Never overwrite the roster with empty or guessed data; on any uncertainty, preserve the last-known value and raise a warning.
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