AI Coding News: Agents Move Into Slack and Microsoft Teams

Yesterday's story was a nameless model with no press release. This one is the opposite: Slack, Salesforce, and GitHub all shipped features that put a name on where AI coding agents actually work. In the past five days, Salesforce launched Slack Code, GitHub Copilot picked up its own Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations, OpenAI kept pushing Codex CLI alpha builds, and the still-unclaimed Ox Alpha model is heading toward a promised reveal around August 27. Here's what's genuinely new since our last update, and what's worth trying today.

AI coding leaves the terminal for the group chat

On August 20, Salesforce launched Slack Code, a feature that turns AI-assisted coding into a shared team activity instead of a private exchange between one developer and one agent. Tag a coding agent from any Slack conversation and it spins up a dedicated code channel with four tabs: one for the conversation, one for the plan, one for the code diffs, and one for a live preview of the output. Everyone in the channel can follow along, review the plan before it runs, and inspect diffs without ever leaving Slack.

Slack Code is live on every Slack plan at launch, though each team still needs its own access to the agents it wants to use. Salesforce lists Anthropic's Claude Code, Cognition's Devin, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Vercel's agents among the supported ecosystem, and the company says it plans to open the underlying code-channel APIs to any developer. The pitch is straightforward: keep human approval in the loop while making agent work legible to an entire team, not just the person who typed the prompt.

GitHub answers with Copilot in Slack and Copilot in Microsoft Teams

One day later, on August 21, GitHub shipped its own version of the same idea on two fronts. The new GitHub Copilot experience in Slack lets teams mention @GitHub in any channel to answer questions about code and GitHub activity, triage and manage issues, investigate failing builds, and open pull requests with a link back to the conversation that spawned them, all in a secure sandbox. Sessions are shared rather than private, so developers can watch how teammates prompt the agent and learn from it. It's in public preview for Copilot Business and Enterprise plans, and repository admins can require extra approval before an agent-authored pull request merges.

The same day, shared agentic work with GitHub Copilot in Microsoft Teams landed as a separate public preview. The pitch is timed to meetings: mention @GitHub during a standup to have Copilot start investigating a bug while the discussion is still happening, then keep working on it asynchronously in a cloud sandbox after the call ends. Results carry over into your IDE, terminal, or the Copilot app, anyone in the conversation can steer the agent, but only participants with repository write access can trigger actual changes, and cloud sandbox time and AI credits are billed separately from a normal Copilot seat.

• Slack Code (Salesforce): live on all Slack plans since Aug 20, supports Claude Code, Devin, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Vercel agents, four-tab code channels for conversation, plan, diffs, and live preview.
• GitHub Copilot in Slack: public preview since Aug 21 on Business/Enterprise plans, @GitHub mentions trigger issue triage, investigations, and PRs, admin-gated merges.
• GitHub Copilot in Microsoft Teams: public preview since Aug 21 on paid Copilot plans, meeting-time triggers, cloud sandbox continuity into IDE/terminal, separate sandbox and AI-credit billing.

Quick hits: Codex alphas keep stacking, Claude Code holds steady, Ox Alpha's clock ticks down

OpenAI shipped Codex CLI v0.150.0-alpha.8 on August 24, continuing the alpha train that already carried an MCP SDK upgrade to 3.0.0 and a Ratatui bump for the terminal UI in earlier builds this week; no user-facing notes have been published for alpha.8 yet, so treat it as groundwork rather than a feature drop. The stable release stays at v0.149.1. Claude Code held at v2.1.241, unchanged since August 23, so anyone already updated this week is current.

And the anonymous Ox Alpha coding model we covered yesterday still has no confirmed owner, but community tokenizer fingerprinting has narrowed the guesswork: probes reportedly matched Z.ai's GLM-5.3 family on 6 of 9 tests and all 4 tokenizer checks, well ahead of every other candidate lab tested. OpenCode's original launch note promised roughly a week of free access from its August 20 debut, which points to a possible reveal around August 27. Nothing here is confirmed, so keep the model on low-stakes tasks until a lab actually claims it.

What it means for developers

The throughline this cycle isn't a new model, it's a new venue. Three separate vendors decided in the same week that the right place for an agent to work is wherever the team is already talking, not a dedicated IDE session. If you manage a team, that's worth a trial run: point Slack Code or Copilot's Slack/Teams preview at a low-stakes bug fix before trusting it with a production pull request, and leave the admin-approval gate turned on. If you're a solo developer, none of this changes your daily driver, Claude Code and Codex CLI's stable channel are both quiet this week, so update on your own schedule.

Sources & further reading

• Salesforce: Introducing Slack Code
• GitHub Changelog: The new GitHub Copilot experience in Slack
• GitHub Changelog: Shared agentic work with GitHub Copilot in Microsoft Teams
• OpenAI Codex CLI releases (GitHub)
• Claude Code changelog
• VentureBeat: Slack wants to drag AI coding out of the terminal and into the group chat