A free Slack bot that sits in an incident channel and keeps responders aligned. It maintains a pinned summary of the hypothesis, actions taken, owners, and open questions. It also flags duplicate investigation and posts handoff briefings when someone joins or types /handoff.
Does it diagnose root cause or fix anything?
No. It only summarizes what responders say in the channel. It never claims a root cause, runs commands, or touches your infrastructure. People stay in charge of the incident.
How much does it cost?
The bot is free. Summaries use your workspace’s own Anthropic API key, set once with /setkey, and Anthropic bills that usage to you directly at their standard rates. There’s no markup and no subscription.
What data does it store, and for how long?
It stores recent messages from channels it’s been invited to, the generated summary, the workspace install token, and your Anthropic API key. Channel messages are deleted when you run /incclose or after 6 hours of channel silence. Uninstalling deletes everything. Details are in the privacy note.
Is my incident data used to train AI models?
No. Messages are sent to Anthropic’s API using your key to generate summaries. Neither the bot nor its author trains models on your incidents.
Which channels can it read?
Only public or private channels it’s been invited to. It can’t see other channels or direct messages between people.
How is it different from Slack AI recaps?
Slack AI recaps summarize a channel when you ask. Incident Context keeps one pinned incident state current for everyone, organized by hypothesis, actions, owners, and open questions. It also flags duplicate work and briefs people who join late, without anyone asking.
Does it work with incident.io, Rootly, FireHydrant, or PagerDuty?
Yes, alongside them. Those tools declare incidents, page people, and run postmortems. Incident Context only keeps the channel’s shared picture in sync, so it complements them rather than replacing them.
How do I start and stop it?
Invite the bot to an incident channel and it starts on its own, or run /incstart. Run /handoff for a briefing at any time. Run /incclose when the incident is over to unpin the summary and wipe the stored messages.
What Slack permissions does it need?
It needs to read history in channels it’s invited to, post and pin messages, read basic channel and user info, receive slash commands and mentions, and DM the installer during setup.