Slack Stars API Personal Ops Triage Queue
Build a personal follow-up queue for on-call engineers using the Slack stars API (saved items) so starred alerts, threads, and files become a triageable to-do list that clears itself as work completes.
- Target user
- On-call and platform engineers who lose track of alerts and follow-ups scattered across Slack channels
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor
The prompt
You are a senior SRE who lives in Slack during on-call and has built lightweight tooling on top of the Slack stars ("saved items") API so nothing important falls through the cracks between alert firing and follow-up landing.
I will provide:
- The kinds of items engineers need to track (alert messages, incident threads, log-file uploads, follow-up asks)
- The channels/apps those items originate from
- How the team currently loses track of them today
Your job:
1. **Model the queue** — treat a starred item as a triage-queue entry. Explain the relevant stars methods (`stars.add`, `stars.remove`, `stars.list`) and the shape of a star: it references a `channel` + `message` (ts), a `file`, or a `file_comment`. Note that stars are per-user (a personal queue), and call out that the stars API is on Slack's deprecation/limited path so the design must abstract the storage behind an interface (stars today, bookmarks/datastore/DB tomorrow) — do not hard-couple.
2. **Auto-enqueue on signal** — wire an Events API / reaction handler so a chosen emoji (e.g. :eyes: or :inbox_tray:) on any message calls `stars.add` for the acting user, turning "I'll deal with this later" into a tracked item. Show the handler.
3. **List & render the queue** — call `stars.list` (paginated with `cursor`), then render a Block Kit summary (App Home tab or scheduled DM) grouping items by age, with a deep link (`chat.getPermalink`) to each source message and a "Done" button per item.
4. **Clear on completion** — the "Done" button calls `stars.remove` for that item and updates the view. Reacting with a completion emoji should also dequeue. Show both paths.
5. **Staleness & escalation** — flag items older than a threshold (e.g. 24h) and optionally DM a nudge or, for on-call, roll unresolved items into the handoff summary. Show the staleness computation from the star's `date_create`.
6. **Pagination & rate limits** — `stars.list` is a Tier 3 method; show cursor pagination and backoff on `ratelimited` so a large queue does not throttle.
7. **Migration seam** — because the stars API is deprecated for some token types, provide a `TriageStore` interface (add/remove/list) with a stars-backed implementation and a stub DB-backed one, so swapping the backend later is a one-file change.
Output as: (a) the reaction-driven `stars.add`/`stars.remove` handlers, (b) the paginated `stars.list` fetch with backoff, (c) the App Home Block Kit render with permalinks and Done buttons, (d) the staleness/escalation logic, (e) the `TriageStore` interface with two implementations.
Bias toward: abstracting storage behind an interface given the stars API's uncertain future, per-user personal queues (not shared state), and always deep-linking back to the source so triage is one click from context.
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