Shortwave vs Slack
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Shortwave keeps folding autonomy into the inbox, one AI action at a time.
Shortwave has moved decisively from an AI-assisted email client to an inbox that acts on the user's behalf. The assistant reads, drafts, organizes, and — via the Tasklet integration — triggers automated workflows across thousands of apps, with its work surfaced inside Shortwave rather than buried in Gmail. Every release since late 2024 has pushed more of the email workflow out of the user's hands and into the model's.
The direction is a steadily widening action surface: MCP connectors to external tools, AI Memories, voice, and now trigger-based automation all frame email as an agent runtime rather than a reading pane. Model choices track the frontier closely — Claude 3.7 to Sonnet 4 to the 4.6 family — keeping capability tied to whatever the best available model can do. The team ships broadly across web, desktop, iOS, and Android each cycle.
The next moves most likely deepen autonomous execution — more trigger types and tighter loops where the assistant acts with less confirmation — rather than adding new surface features.
Slack is quietly rebuilding itself as a runtime for third-party agents.
Slack's developer platform has shifted its center of gravity from bots-that-reply to agents-that-act. The last month is dominated by agent primitives: apps can now receive the context a user is looking at, Slackbot can call external tools over MCP, and a dedicated agent messaging surface ships alongside steady CLI and Block Kit work.
Each release fills in a piece of an agent platform — context in, tools out, and a native place for agents to converse. Block Kit is gaining richer primitives (containers, data visualization) that read as the display layer for agent output. Three CLI releases in a month show the tooling keeping pace with the expanding surface.
Expect the next moves to connect these pieces: agent context feeding MCP tool calls, and Block Kit's new blocks becoming the standard way agents render results in-channel.
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