A Slack standup bot
that writes itself.

How a Slack standup bot works

A standup bot is a Slack app installed through OAuth, posting with a bot token. What differs is where the update comes from:

• Check-in bots message each person at a set time and collect the answers. Opening a DM takes conversations.open with the im:write scope; reading the replies takes the message.im event, which needs im:history.
• Bots that read the work skip the questions: they pull the day's activity from GitHub or other tools, write the update, and post it with chat.postMessage (chat:write, plus chat:write.public for public channels the bot hasn't joined).
• Local time: users.info (users:read) returns each member's tz, so the bot can post at 6pm wherever each person is, or queue the post ahead with chat.scheduleMessage, up to 120 days out.
• Slack's limits: about one message per second per channel, at most 30 scheduled messages per channel in any 5 minutes, and 50 blocks per message.

curl -s https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SLACK_BOT_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{
    "channel": "C0123456789",
    "text": "Standup: Ana, October 5",
    "blocks": [
      { "type": "header", "text": { "type": "plain_text", "text": "Ana, October 5" } },
      { "type": "section", "text": { "type": "mrkdwn",
        "text": "*Shipped* <https://github.com/acme/api/pull/412|#412> retry queue for webhooks" } },
      { "type": "section", "text": { "type": "mrkdwn", "text": "*Next* load-test the queue" } }
    ]
  }'

What goes in a Zest standup

Each engineer's standup is written from that day's work. A pull request counts as theirs only if they authored it; their reviews count as support:

• Coding-agent sessions from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot Chat, Grok Build or Hermes.
• GitHub activity from the Zest GitHub App: pull requests opened, merged and closed, reviews, review comments, comments and issues.
• Sent at 6pm in the engineer's time zone (each person can move the hour), to your team's Slack channel, and by email to anyone who turns email on.

The Slack app's permissions

Zest installs through OAuth v2 and posts with chat.postMessage and Block Kit from a bot token. It asks for bot scopes only, no user scopes. Each team can pick its own channel, or use the workspace default:

Once a week: the Team Standup

On Fridays at 17:00 in the team's time zone by default, the Team Standup rolls the week up in three parts: the AI stack worth sharing (the skills and practices that spread), three wins with their owner and pull request, and up to three moves to ship more. It goes to the timeline and the workspace owners' email, and to Slack when the workspace is connected.