What I Built

Today I started Echo , an AI Slack bot that acts as a teammate inside your workspace. The idea hit me because our team was constantly switching tabs to look things up, ask questions, check what happened in a channel yesterday. I thought what if there was a bot that just lives in Slack and handles all of that?

---

What I Did

1. Created the Slack App

Went to api.slack.com/apps and created a new app from scratch.

• Chose Socket Mode instead of HTTP webhooks, this means the bot connects outbound to Slack, so I don’t need to expose a server or set up ngrok during development. Way easier for local dev.
• Added the required OAuth scopes: chat:write, commands, channels:history, users:read etc everything Echo would need to read messages and respond.
• Grabbed the three tokens I’d need:
  • SLACK_BOT_TOKEN (xoxb-…)
  • SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET
  • SLACK_APP_TOKEN (xapp-… for Socket Mode)

2. Initialized the Node.js Project

I’ve used Node.js for my project

npm install @slack/bolt dotenv axios cheerio

Dependencies I’m working with:

• @slack/bolt — Slack’s official framework for building bots. Handles all the event routing, slash commands, and ack() timing .
• dotenv — keep tokens out of the code
• axios — for hitting the HackClub AI API later
• cheerio — for parsing web content (I’ve planned for search in some cmds)

Problem I Had:

Socket Mode confusion , at first I wasn’t sure whether to use Socket Mode or HTTP. Read through the Bolt docs and realized Socket Mode is the right call for development because I don’t need a public URL. HTTP is for production deployments.