Background Agent (GitHub, Slack, Linear,…)
I was hoping my automation would be able to ‘react’ to a thread. But instead it said “I don’t have a reaction tool available, so I’ll acknowledge via a thread reply.” The pre-built automations have this skill. It would be great if custom automations could do it too.
Hi @John_A!
It sounds like the Slack MCP server is indicating (or causing the agent to indicate) that no reaction tool is available. This would be a good candidate for a feature request to their team (a slack_add_reaction tool or something like that!)
That said, I’m curious about how your automations are triggered. Is the trigger a new Slack message you want to react to, or are you searching for other messages and wanting to react to those?
Hi Colin,
The automation is triggered on a cron job. I didn’t want to use the ‘on new message’ feature because our threads often receive a number of valuable responses in the first few minutes. The full context is often no available immediately.
The reaction is a valuable to tag the thread as ‘in progress’ immediately so subsequent cron jobs can ignore it but also so authors know the it is being addressed before a full response is ready.