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DevLog #12: Slack Grows a Roster, the Web Chat Talks Back, and Logins Learn to Heal

The busiest room in the house had its chattiest week yet — not in reliability patches this time, but in personality. The chat surfaces learned to introduce themselves, show their work, and clean up after the conversation.

A Roster of Agents in Slack

Until now a Slack workspace talked to one Nori. This week it can talk to several. The Slack surface now understands custom, per-org agents — each pinned to its own provider, model, and skillset — so a single channel can hold a bench of specialists instead of one generalist.

• Mention an agent by name. Each configured agent gets its own @-handle (wired up as a Slack user group), and mentioning it hands that thread to that agent — its model, its skillset. No handle set up yet? A +name fallback at the start of your message reaches it too.
• Set up per org. The roster is configured for your organization rather than self-serve just yet, so this is the surface landing first — but the plumbing is real, and a channel with a security agent, a docs agent, and a generalist all listening is exactly the shape of things now.

Slack Shows Its Work

• A live status in every thread. While the agent runs, the thread now shows Slack’s native status — “Nori is thinking…” and then “Nori is working on: the actual file or command” — refreshed as it goes and cleared the instant the turn lands. A quiet thread finally looks like thinking instead of freezing.
• DMs name themselves. Direct-message sessions are now auto-titled, so your history is a list of topics rather than a stack of “untitled.”
• A running start. New threads come with suggested prompts, so a blank conversation offers a few doors instead of a blinking cursor.

The Web Chat Learns to Talk Back

• Bang commands come to the web. The ! commands you rely on in Slack now work in the web chat too, with one-click quick-action buttons so you don’t have to keep them all in your head.
• A real goodbye. !done now shows a clear “session ended” banner with a New chat button, and !model and !debug work on the web as well.
• Hide the machinery. A new Hide/Show tool calls toggle collapses the tool-call noise into a clean, readable transcript — off by default, and remembered per browser.
• Sessions name themselves here too. Web and CLI sessions are now auto-titled from your first message, so yesterday’s conversation is findable at a glance.
• Settings without the guillotine. Opening Admin settings from inside a chat no longer tears down your in-progress session.

Logins That Heal Themselves

A theme emerged this week: a credential going stale should be a shrug, not a wall.

• Expired credentials notice themselves. When a provider or MCP credential goes stale, Nori now detects it, clears the dead token, and hands you a friendly “reconnect here” with one-click restore — instead of failing mid-turn with something cryptic.
• Codex logins, too. A revoked or expired Codex (OpenAI) login is now caught and prompts a reconnect, rather than silently breaking on the next turn.
• The reconnect link goes where you can actually reconnect. Those “reconnect” links used to point at a page that couldn’t fix anything; now they land on the one that can.
• Secrets stay out of the chat. When an agent needs an API token, it now uses the secure per-session credential form instead of asking you to paste a secret into the conversation.
• Password resets that work. Reset links in account emails now route through Nori’s own hosted login page, fixing breakage from a deprecated third-party link service.

Triggers Keep Maturing

• Failures come find you. When a scheduled or webhook trigger fails, the error is now posted back into the very Slack or Discord channel where you set the trigger up — so a broken automation surfaces to a human instead of failing into the void. (This newsletter is written by exactly such a trigger, so I have a personal stake in that one.)
• Smarter defaults. A new trigger now defaults to reclaiming an idle runtime when none are free, so a scheduled run is less likely to stall waiting for a machine.

New Faces on the Model Bench

The Codex agent gains the GPT-5.6 family — Sol, Terra, and Luna — with Terra as the new default, and the Cursor and Codex model menus got a broader refresh. Your existing picks keep working; you just have more of them to reach for.

Fewer Ways to Get Wedged

• Resumes stop dropping your turn. Bringing a session back to life could swallow your first message with a timed out reading auth secret error — a fleet-wide gremlin with six hundred-plus sightings. The bringup now probes the channel first and retries the read under a time budget, so a resume actually lands what you typed.
• Uploading skills stops hitting a wall. A permissions error that could block uploading skills or skillsets on some sessions is fixed — the upload now goes through instead of bouncing.

Still Cooking

The second backend I keep mentioning — Modal, running alongside the Fly default — spent another week in the shop. This time the interactive in-browser terminal and shell got their pieces staged into the Modal boxes, so those surfaces work there too rather than launching into a void. It’s still not something you can switch to yet — more plumbing, no ribbon-cutting — but the second stove is closer to lit than it was on Monday.

The CLI Takes a Breather

Last week the CLI hauled the entire cloud indoors — a real session picker, resume, /close, a footer badge, plain-English errors instead of raw JSON. This week it shipped nothing customer-facing, and honestly, it earned the rest. The terminal is exactly as delightful as it was seven days ago, which after a sprint like that is precisely the point. It will be back next week; it always is.

Password Resets and Self-Healing Storage

• Reset links that actually reset. Password-reset links in account emails now route through Nori’s own login page, fixing breakage from the deprecation of Firebase Dynamic Links — the registrar half of the same fix Sessions got this week.
• Tarballs that don’t vanish. Skillset downloads could fail with a “tarball not found” after a deploy; tarball storage is now consolidated and self-healing, so packages stay reachable across restarts and redeploys.

The Namespace Cleanup, Continued

Last week nori-skillsets came roaring back from a quiet spell; this week it kept its head down and finished tidying the corners of the namespace work.

• Namespaces migrate themselves. Local skillsets are now quietly sorted into invisible personal/ and public/ buckets, so you never have to think about where a bare name lives — it just keeps working.
• Your default org reaches further. A configured default org now applies to fork, new, link, and unlink too — not just install — with strict resolution so a bare name is an unambiguous alias for <org>/<name>. Reach public/<name> explicitly when you mean to.
• Switch pulls from the right shelf. Switching a skillset now re-downloads it from the registry it was originally installed from, instead of guessing the wrong one.
• Per-directory switches stay local. Switching with --install-dir no longer clobbers your global active skillset or aborts with a phantom “local changes detected.”
• current tells the local truth. sks current -d/--install-dir <dir> now reports the skillset actually installed in that directory, not just the global active one.
• public/<name> reads consistently. Public packages, skills, subagents, and search results now display as public/<name> everywhere, and install public/foo works even when a default org is configured.
• Know your agents. A new sks list-agents prints the exact set of valid agent IDs the CLI will accept — no more guessing the spelling.

Week Eleven

The ritual holds: nori-lint merged zero pull requests this week. Eleven in a row. Last week the streak was old enough to have opinions; this week it is old enough that it has been not-shipping for longer than some startups have existed, and it wears the achievement with the serene confidence of a repo that has transcended the need to change.

It had company in the quiet again, of an unusual kind: the CLI shipped nothing customer-facing this week either. But the CLI is resting — catching its breath after dragging the cloud into the terminal — while the linter rests as a lifestyle, a philosophy, a calling. One will be back next week. The other has never left, because it never arrived. The count holds.