A tale of one-off, coding agents and the shortest path to victory
I needed to export all the messages from one of our Slack channels. Slack has a way of exporting everything, but nothing that could easily just give me all the messages in a single channel.
There are tools like slackdump or Slack apps that I could use, and I tried, but I got lost trying to make it work. In frustration, I opened VS Code and wrote:
I want a simple node.js that accepts a channel name from Slack and export all the messages in the channel to a CSV file
The output was a single script and instructions on how I should register to get the right token. It literally took me less time to ask for the script than to try to figure out how to use the “proper” tools for this.
The ability to do these sorts of one-off things is exhilarating.
Keep in mind: this isn’t generally applicable if you need something that would actually work over time. See my other post for details on that.

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