Put a task to work in your channels.
Hivework turns a job you describe in plain words into a task that runs on its own. Connect Slack and that task can read the channel it was pointed at, do the work, and post the answer back where the conversation already is.
Free to start, no card. Adding the app takes about two minutes and needs permission to add apps to your Slack workspace.
First, the service
What Hivework is, if you have not met it
Hivework is a place to build small workers — we call them tasks — that do a recurring job for you and hand back something real.
You describe the job the way you would describe it to a new hire: what starts it, what it should look at, what it should do, and where the result goes. Hivework turns that into a task you can read step by step, try once by hand, and then leave running on a schedule.
Slack is one of the places a task can look and one of the places it can put things. It is not a requirement — Hivework works without it — but a channel is usually where the question was asked, so it is a natural place for the answer to land.
In Slack
What the app does once it is in your workspace
Three things, and nothing you did not ask for.
Reads the channel you point it at
A task can pull the recent messages of a public channel it has been added to — the standup thread, the incident channel, the one where customer questions land — and work from what was actually said, with names resolved rather than raw ids.
Posts the result back in Slack
The work lands where the conversation already is: a summary in the channel at 9am, an answer under the thread that asked for it, a note to the channel when a long job finishes. No new place for your team to go and check.
Does the part in between
Between reading and posting is the actual task — summarise, draft the reply, pull the matching record out of your other tools, decide whether this one is even worth posting. That is the part you describe once, in plain words, in Hivework.
Hivework App 9:00 AM
Yesterday in #support — 14 messages, 3 themes.
Billing (6). Four people asked why the invoice date moved. Priya has the answer in a thread; worth a pinned note.
Import failures (5). All five are the same CSV column, all from one customer. Linked to the open ticket.
Unanswered (1). Marcus asked about the API rate limit at 4:40pm and nobody replied.
And it can talk to you directly
Link your own account to the app and Hivework can send you a direct message when a task needs something from you — a question mid-run, a yes before it sends the email it drafted, a note that a long job finished. You answer in the chat and the task carries on. It only reads the messages you send it, never your other conversations.
It works the other way round too: a task can be set to start when you message the bot — with an optional filter so only messages containing a particular word count. It replies to say it has started, and comes back to the same chat when it has something for you.
Getting set up
How to install it
Four steps, in this order. You start from Hivework rather than from Slack, because the app is connected to your Hivework account.
- 1
Create a Hivework account
Free, and no card. If you already have one, sign in.
- 2
Open Connections and choose Slack
Connections is in the Hivework dashboard. Slack is in the list of apps you can connect.
- 3
Authorize the Hivework app for your workspace
Slack shows you exactly what you are granting and which workspace you are granting it in. You need permission to add apps to that workspace — if you do not have it, Slack offers to ask an owner for you.
- 4
Invite the bot to the channels it should see
In Slack, type /invite @Hivework in a channel. The app only ever sees the public channels it has been invited to — adding it in one channel does not give it the others.
After you install
What happens next
Installing an app and getting something out of it are two different days for most people. They should not be here.
Slack comes back to Hivework
Authorizing returns you to your Connections page with the workspace shown as connected, so you can see it worked rather than hope it did.
Describe the task in plain words
Something like: "every weekday at 9, read #support from the last day and post a short summary of what people are stuck on." Hivework builds the task from that description and shows you each step before anything runs.
Try it once before it is on a schedule
Run it by hand and read what it posts. Every run keeps a record of what it read, what it decided and what it sent, so the first one is something you check rather than something you trust.
Stuck at any point? Support is one page away and answers within two business days — no account needed to write to us.
Access
What you are granting, in plain words
Slack shows you this list at the moment you authorize. Here it is beforehand, with what each one is for.
channels:historyRead messages in the public channels the app has been invited to. This is what lets a task summarise a channel.
channels:readList public channels, so you can say “#support” when you build a task instead of pasting a channel id.
chat:writePost messages as the Hivework app. Nothing is ever posted as you.
users:readTurn user ids into names, so a summary reads “Priya asked about billing” rather than a string of characters.
im:historyRead direct messages sent to the Hivework bot — and only those. This is what lets you answer the app in a chat; it gives no access to your conversations with anyone else.
The app never joins a channel on its own — someone has to invite it — and it has no access to private channels or to anyone's direct messages with other people. To remove it, open Settings & administration → Manage apps in Slack and choose Remove App; access stops immediately.
Data and honesty
Two things worth reading before you install
Your Slack data
What we collect, how long we keep it, and how to ask for a copy or have it deleted are all in the Privacy Policy. Ask us at hello@hivework.xyz and we answer within two business days. We do not train models on your Slack data.
It uses a language model
The reading-and-deciding part of a task runs on a large language model, which means it can be wrong — a summary can miss a message, or state something with more confidence than the thread supports. Read what it posts before you act on it, and keep a person in the loop on anything consequential. Every run keeps a record of what it read and what it did, so a wrong answer is one you can trace.
Give the channel someone to do the reading.
Free to start. Build the first task in a few minutes, watch it run once, and decide from what it posts.
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