Josh

I made a slack bot!

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I made a Slack bot!

Following up on a previous post (The Hack Club Problem), where I questioned my limited skill level and knowledge and asked, “How am I going to make a Slack bot in 18 days?”, I’m happy to say I’ve somehow done it!

What started out as Josh’s Servant, which literally just spit my Last.fm “now playing” into a channel—has evolved into Slack Annoyance, a jack-of-some-trades, master-of-none bot. It posts Last.fm now playing to a channel, /acnhquote for Animal Crossing quotes, Greg (an AI bot that commits Hackatime fraud), Geoff (who catches Hackatime fraudsters), and a welcomer bot.

I would be lying if I said I did this alone, Kyle (Dekoder-py) also maintains the bot and has the Lastfm and welcomer bot setup in his channel. Without him, Slack annoyance would still be just lastfm.

However, a cool Slack Bot cant replace the utility of workflows. Winterflows now exist, which are a workflow replacement. However, (No offense to the creator of winterflows) there was something so easy and effortless about workflows. I litreally made my welcomer workflow on the bus.

Thats about all I have for you right now, and I'll see some of you in the Flavortown Kitchen.

As always, if you have an issue, josh [at] slitrostudio [dot] me

The Great Hack Club Slack Migration

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

On Monday at 10am EST, the Hack Club Slack went down for the long-awaited migration to Slack’s Enterprise Grid.

In theory, this unlocks all the fun enterprise-tier features: SAML SSO via Hack Club Account (IDV), a unified identity layer, and Workflow Builder Branching (which was very short-lived — RIP Workflows).

The keyword being “in theory.”

As soon as things came back up, everything was a little off.

Problem #1: Email mismatch My Slack account uses a different email than my Hack Club Account (IDV). Because Enterprise Grid treats your SSO as the primary email, Slack logged me into a completely different account that wasn’t mine, but still an account on an email I owned.

Problem #2: This might break my ability to submit to YSWS Programs Since my emails are split — one on the slitrostudio.me domain, the other being my old Gmail — I have no idea how this affects things like submitting The House Standard Deviation to Flavortown. If Hack Club Accounts are now the source of truth and I can’t change that email, that’s… not great.

I’ve managed to get back into my normal Slack account, but everything else (like YSWS programs) is blocked because I can’t re-verify my identity. I don’t exactly want to risk getting flagged for fraud just to submit again. And right now, IDV simply doesn’t support changing your email.

HQ’s current answer is basically: “wait until IDV supports email changes.”

For a migration that’s supposed to unify identity, it’s a strange place to be stuck.

Thanks for listening to me yap.

The Hack Club Problem

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

UPDATE: HQ and community members are working on a fix. More details at bottom of post.

Hack Club Has A Problem. (It's Slack)

Slack (and salesforce) are greedy. But where does a Non-profit teaching high schoolers to code fall into this?

Well, I'll put the workflow problem this way.

Imagine purchasing your meeting rooms Samsung TVs, everyone uses them constantly, and then Samsung emails you saying “hey, you’re using those too often — fix it.” You bring it to the CEO and he goes, “yeah, cool, shut them off.”

Sound odd?

I thought so, but that's what is happening with the Hack Club Slack.

At 4:23pm NZDT, there was a message posted on the #community channel. I have attached it below. "Hey y’all!

Due to repeated abuse of workflows, we sadly will be removing workflows from the Hack Club Slack on December 9th, 2025 This is not something we wanted, but sadly due to repeated abuse, and no way to prevent the abuse, it makes sense to disable them. We recommend moving your workflows to Slack bots as workflows may stop working.

We know this is a big change. So we are also launching a $100 bounty for someone that can create a privacy-conscious Slack bot that can be configured to add people to private channels, with approval and optional questions. This can be used as a replacement for personal and private channel adders. Put your GitHub in the thread if you want to participate "

This was sudden, and with only 18 days of notice? I have ~7 Slack workflows and no knowledge on how to make a slack bot, even worse, Zach Latta said "Also - this is a community of programmers and I’ve never seen so much defense of a no code tool :-P". It's not the fact that its no-code, it's that it was easy to quickly make one to say, ask what you did during your day at 5:45 PM everyday. HQ even relies on many no-code tools (Airtable and Zapier for example). Even people inside HQ didn't even know this was happening. See the below message from Rowan in #community. "When the great Slack migration happened, core HQ people in HQ-HQ got a heads-up and had a meeting to discuss this. We talked it through, everyone could ask questions, and we wrote up migration guides for all.

This never happened for banning workflows."

This left me with 3 questions.

How am I going to make a slack bot in 18 days?
Why weren't other people in HQ notified about this?
How screwed are we if Slack reached out to us about this? (Did i mention Slack reached out to us about this)

The best part? If we move to mattermost in 5 years (When our enterprise runs out) we are screwed again. To be clear, there was real abuse. Some workflows were being triggered thousands of times a day, flagging us as a problem. So yes, Slack has a reason to be concerned, but fixing abuse doesn’t require eliminating the entire feature for 20,000+ teenagers with 18 days of notice. Rate limits, caps, approvals, or workflows restricted to trusted people would’ve solved the abuse. Instead, we are losing the whole system.

UPDATE

One part of what workflows were used for, joining private channels, has been implimented into Neon's bot Zeon. Existing workflows will stay.

Message to Hack Club HQ

If you want anything fixed to be more accurate or clarified, email me at josh [at] slitrostudio [dot] me Thanks!

Put the Slop generator in the Slop Box

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Time to lock the Slop Generator in the Slop Box

Find a suitable container.
Place your phone or a hardware AI device inside.
(Optional) Open Gemini Live or any AI live voice mode of your choice.
Pair a Bluetooth speaker to a device outside the container.
Put the speaker in the box
Close the box.
Feed it pure AI slop.
Enjoy your slop prison!

This works well with the Friend AI devices or any other always listening AI Device.

Let me know how it works for you by emailing me at hey at slitrostudio dot me

Summer of Making

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The summer winter was ours for the making. Now its over.

I joined Hack Club for SoM through an invite through a Discord server. After a few minor setbacks (RIP 2020 M1 Macbook Pro) I was off to the races in VScode, making (rather poorly developed) websites! For me (and many others) it was in the winter, but potato potato.

You can see my SoM Wrapped there.

Daydream Reflection

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

What do making a game, getting locked in a box, and drinking lots of L&P have in common?

That's right, Daydream!

Daydream was a fun event held over the weekend of the 27th-28th in more than 100 cities!

Before attending, I had no experience with Godot. By the end, I actually knew how to make a game in Godot!
About the "getting locked in a box"—I ended up stuck in a conferencing pod and was told to "make a scene" while my partner played Clash.

The theme was "a sacrifice must be made," so we created a game where jumping required pressing space 12 times, sacrificing your fingers for the cause. We called it Carpal Tunnel Simulator. You can play the game Here!

Hey there!

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hey there

Welcome to my silly lil blog. Documenting what I do on the web since Sept 2025! I dont know how this works