Slack is my IDE

How we solved commit attribution for our company-wide agent with personal integrations

What is your IDE these days? Maybe yours is Cursor, Claude Code, or VSCode. You do you! Mine is Slack.

Before we get started, let’s set the stage a little.

• I’m a Product Engineer at Adapt. I enjoy building things, and I have been increasingly using our Slack agent to build things or to build things in the background while I keep focused on tasks I can uniquely do, and
• You can think of Adapt as your company agent with two primary agent surfaces (one web, one Slack), both of which are deeply integrated into our team’s tooling, workflows, and knowledge

So now my confession: I’ve been addicted to coding on Slack with our Adapt agent. Adapt has access via our integrations layer to our repos via the GitHub integration and our error logging in Sentry (amongst 27 other integrations). It’s been a blast to kick off a coding task or debugging task, watch Adapt do work in the background and open up a PR for me or to help guide me towards a solution, all without leaving Slack.

Working with Adapt on a bug

But… this addiction has problems, and an interesting workflow in the AI era reveals new problems. So let me tell you about the problems that have emerged in becoming more AI-native and leveraging Adapt’s Slack agent to become more efficient.

Personality crisis

My biggest gripe was that when I had Adapt open PRs for me it would do it under the Adapt bot name and not mine. Commits and PRs wouldn’t be counted as mine and beyond vanity and the glory, I ran into a security and approval issue: when I wanted something in main quickly, I would have Adapt commit and push the changes so I could review and accept the changes. That completely circumvented the need for a human code reviewer and could’ve led to sloppy mistakes.

As a developer, I was able to circumvent our CI/CD process and I wasn’t getting credit for the code. As a reviewer I was always unsure of who opened what and who to ping if I needed changes made, and as a code owner the repo was filled with stale PRs all from Adapt.

So, it was at this point, and also with lots of discussions and reviewing and attending calls with customers, that we recognized there was a problem we could solve.

What customers expect

Customers also expected commits to be co-attributed after working with Cursor or Claude Code. They wanted to keep privileged information in connected systems private to them or to just be able to connect their personal Gmail and calendars as part of their workflow and not worry about anyone else potentially accessing their personal integrations.

With Cursor and Claude Code, individual developers connect their systems. With Adapt, a system can be connected across the company. This is good actually because it means, as an example, that an engineer can gauge the impact of a change on signups by connecting with HubSpot (which was added by Marketing) or a Marketer can make a quick copy change (in GitHub) since the GitHub connection was added by an engineer.

Thus: announcing the ability to add personal integrations! Any integration available on the Adapt platform, which is anything with an API, now supports both organization (visible and accessible to everyone in the organization) and personal (visible only to you) scopes. See the changelog and documentation for more detail.

This ship unlocks a whole host of use cases like that pesky GitHub attribution as one such example, but also a model in which organizations can test and evaluate Adapt before graduating integrations to the organization, or a permissions model that affords a subset of permissions to the organization (like read-only) while enabling more trusted individuals to have write access or more scopes for that particular integration.

And now with this simple configuration, Adapt directly from Slack (or any surface!) will know to associate my personal GitHub integration when it's doing work on my behalf.

The proof, it works, truly!

Beyond GitHub

This goes of course beyond GitHub. I have hooked up my personal Google tools: Gmail, Calendar and Docs. I can manage code reviews, emails and even set up meetings all from Slack. We are in the middle of a natural language renaissance and I’m doing more in a Slack thread than I used to do across six tabs.

One of my first experiments was integrating Spotify. Spotify is notorious for having an opaque API and constantly updating it, making it hard to utilize with a third party application. Adapt was able to hook right in and look through the documentation while figuring out how to analyze my music listening habits. The next thing I had it do was suggest new artists and new songs that I haven’t listened to and it built me a playlist right away. Cue me asking Adapt to build and send me a playlist every morning. It will check which songs from the playlists I’ve saved and which ones I didn’t and use those to build the future ones. I get better daily playlists from Adapt than I do from Spotify and with very little setup needed.

The development journey

At first, I saw this work as a stepping stone to other, more interesting work. It wasn’t until I got it working and started playing around with it that I really saw its power. When the workflow itself is innovative, simple solutions applied in new ways can feel pretty groundbreaking.

Adapt supports 6 OAuth providers today, and can integrate with anything with an API you throw at us. Getting the org-level and personal-level split working with API keys was simple, the OAuth integrations were something else. The work I did wasn’t glamorous, it was dreadfully tedious, but it taught me a lot about how different providers implement their OAuth apps and the real work was figuring out how to abstract them all into a single idea. Once I came up with a unifying schema the rest of the work fell into place.

This has been my favorite, and coolest, feature that I have implemented in my 10+ years as a software engineer. I immediately fell in love with all of the ways I can utilize it and I am not alone. I have seen this catch on around here: people hooking up X, Gmail, Ramp and more and watching their productivity skyrocket. It’s fascinating to see our CEO use the personal Gmail integration to get a quick start on his day or to summarize the dangling threads he left from the previous day. Or seeing customers immediately integrate with the GitHub integration to get their attribution right too.

It felt like pulling teeth at the beginning, but all of that tedium paid off in the end because we now have a reliable, configurable, and sensible solution to integrating as an organization and augmenting for the individual.

Wrap up

I hope you give it a try. Personal integrations are live today for every Adapt user. Salesforce, Notion, GitHub, the Stripe dashboard you check every morning, the internal API your engineering team built last quarter. If it has an API, Adapt can connect to it. Open the Integrations tab in Settings to add your first one. New to Adapt? Get a demo.

Finally, and I truly mean this, let me know what you think. Reach out to us on X, via e-mail (engineering@adapt.com), and we’ll read, reply, and build something dramatically better, and more deeply integrated, together.