One pinned summary for the whole incident channel
Incident Context Copilot is a free Slack incident bot that keeps a single pinned message current with the state of the incident: the hypothesis, what’s been tried, who’s on what, and what’s still open. Responders keep talking normally. The summary keeps up.
What does the pinned incident summary track?
- Current hypothesis, plus the ones the channel has ruled out.
- Actions taken and their results, so nobody repeats a rollback.
- Owners: who is investigating which thread.
- Open questions nobody has answered yet.
The bot rewrites the same pinned message in place, every 8 messages or 5 minutes, whichever comes first. The channel doesn’t fill up with bot posts.
How does it flag duplicate investigation?
When two people start checking the same thing, or a new message contradicts something already ruled out, the bot posts one short note in the summary’s thread. For example: “Maya and Priya are both checking the payment-api connection pool.” It says it once and then stays quiet.
What happens when someone joins late?
New channel members get a handoff briefing covering impact, hypothesis, what’s been tried, owners, and open questions. Anyone can request one at any time with /handoff.
How do you set it up?
- Add it to Slack. It requests channel read, chat write, and pin permissions.
- The installer runs
/setkey sk-ant-…once to store the workspace’s Anthropic API key. - Invite the bot to an incident channel. It starts on its own, or you can run
/incstart.
When it’s over, /incclose unpins the summary and deletes the stored channel messages. If the channel goes quiet for 6 hours, that happens automatically.
Does it replace incident.io, Rootly, or PagerDuty?
No. Those platforms handle declaring incidents, paging, roles, status pages, and postmortems. Incident Context Copilot does one narrow job inside the channel those tools create: keeping every responder’s picture of the incident in sync. It runs fine alongside them, and it’s also enough on its own for small teams who just use a Slack channel.
What doesn’t it do?
- It doesn’t diagnose root cause or claim one.
- It doesn’t run commands, touch infrastructure, or auto-remediate.
- It doesn’t read channels it hasn’t been invited to.