Token consumption on this is not a huge issue, I built this a few months ago for our company slack using claude agent sdk and most of the conversations/sessions were short lived. You don't generally tend to have long sessions with agents in Slack like you would if using in the terminal.
It was very useful to delegate things like create a ticket based on a discussion to Claude.
> You don't generally tend to have long sessions with agents in Slack like you would if using in the terminal.
You have to check the announcement fineprint. As long as they advertise it as proactive it needs to keep up to date with all the ongoing discussions. And I believe that means all group messages. Wouldn't that make sense?
From the announcement
> follows along with its channel, it builds more context about the work
> And Claude can even automatically learn from other Slack channels and data sources, if it’s granted permission.
And the additional "ambient" mode also seems to imply that it will work by itself in background tasks to check (I assume) in some scheduled fashion what stale topics it needs to reengage.
i have a claude-agent-sdk slack bot i built for work; it offers proactive interaction as well but it uses a deterministic filter and then a haiku pass for messages that pass the filter... negligible token cost.
It was very useful to delegate things like create a ticket based on a discussion to Claude.