Takt

Follow topics, not channels. Takt watches your entire Slack workspace via the Real-time Search API and interrupts you only when something that matters is forming

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Follow topics, not channels

Slack users face an impossible choice: keep notifications on and drown, or mute and miss the one decision that mattered. Keyword alerts are dumb string-matching. Recap summarizes channels you already picked. Nothing watches for meaning, everywhere, in real time.

Takt inverts Slack's model: you subscribe to topics, not channels. Tell it in plain language — "follow anything about the payments migration, interrupt me only for decisions" — and Takt sweeps the entire workspace (including channels you don't follow), triages everything new with an LLM, and interrupts only when something that matters is forming. Everything else waits for a daily digest. Ask "what happened with X?" and it streams thinking steps live, then delivers a cross-channel narrative with a permalink to every source. Each topic is an app-like object: a pinned live card in your DM that all activity threads under.

The three technologies — each load-bearing

  1. Real-time Search API (assistant.search.context): background sweeps per topic + on-demand story assembly. Takt is structurally impossible without it.
  2. Slack AI capabilities: agent surface, suggested prompts, chat streaming with thinking-step task cards, new Alert Block Kit component.
  3. MCP server integration: the LLM is handed Slack's hosted MCP server (mcp.slack.com) during narrative stitching to pull full thread context around RTS hits.

Engineering

  • Zero-copy: no message content persisted — SQLite stores topic queries, cursors, permalinks only
  • Rate-limit-first: one RTS call per topic per sweep, global cooldown honoring retry-after, batched triage
  • Graceful degradation: new Block Kit → classic blocks, streaming → status text, MCP → plain stitch
  • Trustworthy by design: digest by default, every interrupt explains why, one-click controls, strictly read-only

Does this exist?

Keyword alerts are proactive but dumb. Recap is smart but reactive and channel-scoped. Nobody does proactive + semantic + workspace-wide — because until RTS shipped in Feb 2026, no app could. Takt is what keyword alerts should have been.

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