Maxine Lai

founder • giving teams extra headcount at 1/10 the cost — by connecting company context • built Tag, open-source AI in Slack

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

guys, we built a +1 you can bring to work 👀

Meet Tag: your personal assistant, in Slack. (not co-worker)

When @karpathy described Claude Tag as “significantly more ‘inline’ with all the other human activity org-wide,” the word “inline” stood out to me.

To me, that’s the interesting shift. You’re not leaving the work to go talk to AI. Your AI joins you where the work is happening.

Few months ago, I found out Slack literally stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge." Instantly, I realise it is a pretty good place for an assistant to start.

If your team already works there, you’ve already discussed the problem, shared the links, and explained why the last idea didn’t work.

Why copy that context into a private AI chat, work through the answer alone, then paste everything back for your team?

With Tag, you mention your assistant in the thread. Ask it to investigate a question, turn the discussion into a plan, or work on a file. It uses the thread as context and brings the result back into the conversation.

But here’s the thing: working together shouldn’t mean everyone has to share one assistant.

Your Tag is yours. You choose its tools, skills, and connected accounts. Your teammates can each bring their own Tag, while everyone contributes to the discussion and follows the work.

It runs on a computer you control. We don’t host your conversations or working file, so your setup still uses Slack and OpenAI, rather than being fully offline.

Tag is also free and open source. It works with the Codex access you already have through ChatGPT, so there’s no extra Tag subscription.

I think the best place to work together with AI is where you’re already working together.

You bring your assistant. Your teammates bring theirs.

Bring your +1 to work.

→ https://t.co/YgRYBhbifK

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@KhraminaDianka WhatsApp? Is there a list to join!

[Dhravya Shah @DhravyaShah]

https://t.co/62lLXqT276

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

The future is team messaging + AI Agents

[Ando @andocorporation]

we’re excited to share that we’ve raised $20M (from Accel, Index, & Emergence) to build the 'ai-native Slack' you've all been craving

TLDR; ando is a team messaging platform built fresh, from the ground, up for a world where agents act as real collaborators alongside us.

we have teams using us across 15 countries, and spanning industries like software, financial services, real estate, & more

request access if any of this resonates 💌

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@yash654k What kind of components, just take it it is open source.

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

remember that you can add your social preview in your GitHub repo (Settings -> General)
👇
https://t.co/6lLSB5lAyL

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@andocorporation Tbf, the other alternatives to Slack are quite bad. The closest we have is Microsoft Teams. Like Meta literally migrated back to Slack after trying out other products. Worst is when they use WhatsApp 💀

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@andocorporation Tbf, the other alternatives to Slack are quite bad. The closest we have is Microsoft Teams. Like Meta literally migrated back to Slack after trying out other products. Worst is when they use WhatsApp 💀

[Prasenjit Sarkar @stretchcloud]

Slack just got a direct challenger built around a premise Slack was never designed for: agents as coworkers, not bots bolted onto a channel.

Ando came out of stealth with a $20M seed from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence Capital. Sara Du's pitch is a team messaging platform built from the ground up for a world where agents act as real collaborators, with their own identity, permissions and shared context inside channels and threads, not a webhook that posts a message and disappears. It is agent agnostic, so teams bring whatever harness they already use, Codex, Claude, Grok, and it is already running across 15 countries in software, financial services and real estate.

What strikes me is that two very different bets are being placed on the same problem right now. Ando is rebuilding the messaging layer itself. NanoClaw takes the opposite approach, staying inside Slack and letting you spin up persistent AI agent teammates from a single message. Blify raised $2.1M doing AI native learning inside Slack and Teams rather than replacing either. Meanwhile Slack and Microsoft Teams are both shipping their own bolt on agent features to defend the incumbency.

I have seen this fork before. Slack itself beat email and IRC not by adding features to old tools but by rethinking the core primitive, the channel. Superhuman did the same thing to email by rebuilding the client around speed instead of retrofitting Outlook. The rebuild-from-scratch bet usually loses on distribution early and wins on architecture later, if it survives long enough.

The bottleneck nobody has actually solved is identity and permissions. Slack's access control was built entirely around humans with accounts. The moment an agent needs to read a thread, act on it and be accountable for what it did, you need a permission model nobody's ACL system was designed to express. That is the real product Ando is betting exists a market for, not the chat UI.

My read: whoever wins this will not win because agents can post messages. They will win because they solved who an agent is allowed to be inside a company, which is a much harder problem than it sounds.

https://t.co/wq6mRbkE4i

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@yash654k Another thing to add is that so far our memory system (powered by @milvusio mfs) is working quite well! Not sure about Hermes agent’s memory system now.

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@aaronedell @SlackHQ Too bad this is not obvious for companies outside the States, like in Malaysia

[Aaron Edell @aaronedell]

One company that was absolutely perfectly setup for the AI era is @SlackHQ
Perfect surface for having bots be orchestrated and engaged with by teams. Handles memory, documents uploading and downloading, and obviously so much more

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@yash654k Yes! But unlike Grok Bot it lets you work together with other people!

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@garrytan why not: use agents to make agents want software?

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

Forgot to include this GitHub repo in my launch of OpenTag (YC S26) alternative

I built my personal assistant for my company with @OpenAI Codex App Server, @Slack Bolt Framework, @milvusio Multi-File Search (MFS)

⭐️ here -> https://t.co/yZ8hEQI2es

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

Does anyone feel that the AI notification summary is more accurate in the new iOS, or is it just my confirmation bias?

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@nicbstme X has been so good ever since I trained the algorithm on AI News

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@thegarrettscott Miss the time when Apple did launch physically instead of launch video

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@theHankTaylor Checkout https://t.co/PQEMaTGR6g

[Maxine Lai @maxinel_ai]

@theHankTaylor atp, what's the point of tagging that employee for a response, I might as well just tag the AI they use