Alchemist: Your Project's Agent in Slack

Every Alchemist project has its own agent. The agent is a Chipp chat assistant. It knows your project’s tickets, and it can create new ones from a conversation. Connect the agent to Slack, and your team can raise work, approve it, and watch it run, all in a channel they already use.

ℹ️

This guide covers the Alchemist project agent in Slack. To deploy one of your own Chipp chatbots (a customer support bot, for example) to Slack, see Slack Integration instead.

1. Connect your project to Slack

Open your project at build.chipp.ai. Go to Connections in the sidebar.
If your project has no agent yet, click Create project agent. This step runs once. The agent is a real Chipp app, restricted to your org’s members. It lives in your org’s Alchemist Agents workspace, never public.
Find the Slack card in the channel grid. Click Connect Slack.

Create a Slack app from Chipp’s manifest

The dialog shows a JSON manifest. It comes pre-configured with your agent’s name, bot permissions, and event subscriptions. Copy it. Go to api.slack.com/apps. Click Create New App. Choose From manifest. Pick your workspace. Paste the manifest in as JSON.

Copy your app’s credentials

Open Basic Information in your new Slack app. Copy the Client ID, Client Secret, and Signing Secret.

Enter them in Chipp and install

Paste the three values into the dialog, then save. Click Install to Slack and authorize the app. Only a Slack workspace admin can complete this step.

Invite the agent to a channel

Run /invite @YourProjectAgent in any channel where your team should raise tickets. Invite it to as many channels as you need.

2. Mention the agent to start something

@mention the agent with what you want. Write to it the way you would write to a teammate.

plaintext

@storefront-agent the cart total doesn't update after a coupon is removed

The agent reads the thread for context and replies there, so the channel stays clean. It may ask a clarifying question first; answer in the same thread. Once it has enough to act, it proposes the work as a ticket instead of acting on its own.

Not every mention has to be a ticket. Ask it to add an environment variable and it hands you back a secure link instead, see Adding Environment Variables and Secrets.

3. Approve or reject the proposal

Before any work starts, the agent posts a card describing the ticket it wants to open, with two buttons: Approve and Reject. Nothing runs until someone clicks Approve.

plaintext

Agent: [card] Fix: cart total after coupon removal    [Approve] [Reject]

Click Approve. The card updates to show it is processing, then updates again once the ticket is dispatched. Click Reject, and nothing is created.

4. Watch it work

A ticket from Slack runs the same way as one from the dashboard or an MCP client. It plans a workflow graph, works in an isolated sandbox against your project’s repository, and lands through the same pipeline. See Alchemist Tickets for how that graph runs.

In Slack, one message updates in place as the agent works. The channel does not fill up with a message per step.

5. Where the result shows up

The finished result posts back to the same thread. The ticket also appears in your project’s normal Tickets list, and in Work Review under its originating thread, next to anything dispatched from the dashboard or over MCP. A ticket from Slack is not a second kind of ticket.

If the agent needs your input mid-run, for example an unclear business rule or a missing credential, it can ask in the same thread. See Answering Agent Questions for what that looks like.

⚠️

Slack must hear back from Chipp within a few seconds of a button click. Approve and Reject acknowledge right away, and the ticket dispatches after. Expect the card to update twice: once to a processing state, then to its final state.

FAQ

Do I need a separate Slack app for each project? Yes. Each project’s agent connects through its own Slack app, created from Chipp’s manifest, the same way any Chipp app connects to Slack.

Who can approve a proposed ticket? Anyone in a channel where the agent is present can mention it and propose work. Approving the card is what creates the ticket.

Does a ticket from Slack cost anything different? No. It runs under your project’s normal ticket budget, like any other ticket. See Alchemist Budgets and Costs.

Can I also get notified by email? Yes. Approvals and cross-project proposals can notify by email as well as Slack. See Cross-Project Proposals for setup.

Can I dispatch a ticket from Slack without the approval step? No. The agent always shows the card before it creates a ticket. This stops a stray mention from turning into billed work.

Next steps

For how the workflow graph runs, see Alchemist Tickets. To script ticket creation instead of chatting with the agent, see the Alchemist Cloud Tickets MCP guide.