Session vs Slack
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Session shipped a protocol rewrite and a paid tier, then went publicly broke — the founder is asking users to bail it out.
Session is simultaneously in its most ambitious technical phase and an open funding crisis. Protocol V2 — re-implementing forward secrecy and layering post-quantum cryptography on top of Session's onion-routed transport — has been announced, and the Session Pro paid tier exited beta planning into a December development update. Then in March, cofounder Chris McCabe published a personal appeal saying the project cannot continue developing without user support, and the public feed has been quiet since.
The product roadmap that was meant to fund itself via Session Pro is colliding with the underlying problem the appeal makes plain: the Loki/Oxen-era token economics and donations aren't covering ongoing development. Protocol V2 and Pro are the bets that have to land for Session to remain viable; if Pro doesn't convert a meaningful share of the user base, the next twelve months are about scope reduction, not feature growth. The Feb 1 APT key rotation in January suggests the core infrastructure is still being maintained — for now.
Watch for either a hard Session Pro launch and conversion announcement, or a more explicit wind-down / handoff post. A long stretch of silence after a funding appeal usually resolves one way or the other within a quarter; the absence of any new posts since mid-March is itself a signal.
Slack rebuilds its developer platform around shipping in-channel AI agents.
Slack is well into a platform pivot, restructuring its CLI, Block Kit, and APIs around AI agent use cases. The 4.0.0 release in April formalized this with an agent-scaffolding command, sample agent apps, and a live-reloading dev workflow. Recent additions — streaming chat APIs, Card/Carousel/Alert blocks, and continued MCP server expansion — show the surface area for in-Slack agents widening fast.
The platform is shifting from 'agents can post messages' to 'agents are first-class UI citizens'. The new chat.startStream / chat.appendStream / chat.stopStream methods change what an agent reply looks like, and the Card and Carousel blocks hint at richer multi-turn agent flows. Security work on PKCE and optional scopes is keeping pace, which tells you third-party agent developers are the audience, not just first-party features.
Expect Slack to publish reference agents and likely a discovery or marketplace surface for agent apps within the next minor cycle, with streaming Block Kit becoming the canonical pattern shown in the docs.
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