I was a little surprised to see a Telegram integration rather than Slack or Teams, given Anthropic's enterprise-first posture. But then I looked it up, and it turns out Telegram dwarfs both, at around 1bn MAUs, vs 50m and 300m respectively! I had no idea - reminds me of the time I found out Snapchat has 2x the userbase of Twitter.
Back in the day, when I used to play pokemon go, there was a small local community and we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.
Then I joined a group from a bigger city where I commuted for work. They had a telegram group chat with two "channels", one for talking, one for bot posts. The telegram bot could be sent a single screenshot of a raid, and it would use OCR to automatically generate an interactive UI for that raid for everyone to see, with all the relevant info, and it would also clear itself up when the raid is no longer relevant. You could press buttons to say you were going, that you MAYBE were going, if you were late, and if you already started/done it, all in single clicks. Tons of options, tons of information, all live updated.
I was bedazzled. That feature singlehandedly removed all attrition from urban social gaming. And it was entirely grassroots. It made me try out making my own telegram bots, and yeah, you basically have the power to make a little app in chat form, even some that feel like CLI commands.
It's been OVER HALF A DECADE and I have yet to see a single other chat application have that degree of freedom where it comes to applications and bots. Some like discord even did whole ass 100% reworks of their bot AP to support the likes of slash commands, and still fall short. And there's none worse than Teams. Teams hates you. Teams spent the prior 2 years before this one basically pointing a gun to our heads telling us they were removing webhooks and pushing back on it whenever they repeatedly get told that's the most insane and dogshit idea ever. And they still did it. There's just no spark in Teams UX. No self-respect. It's a soulless product made entirely as a dumping place of "synergy" with other M$ products. It's reciprocal, I hate it too.
Oh and my local group never go into telegram because they didn't want a new app. It died, but I still kept playing after work without problem. It makes me wonder how fast Teams would die if it wasn't proped up by 365 and Azure subscriptions.
> we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.
This kind of thing is so common in groups of people, it's one of my pet peeves. My own family does this in our group messages when trying to make big decisions like who should host thanksgiving or where we should go for a family vacation.
I make it a point to just take charge and tell people that we're doing XYZ now. It usually either results in a decision, or gets the discussion going enough that I can do it again with new information.
I wonder if Teams hates you, because they are doing the bidding of their actual customers (corporate decisions makers and purse holders), and those people's interests are not exactly aligned with the users'.
The problem is that these people holding the actual purse don't care enough about their subordinates' experience. They care about the price tag, and about compliance. Apparently the makers of Teams think about the same. None of them thinks in terms of lost productivity.
Yes, compliance is a big one. And it's not so much that they are actively hostile to user productivity (and quality of life), they just don't care enough.
I’ve been using Telegram for about 10 years, and it’s one of the few products that has consistently felt great the entire time. It’s fast everywhere: backend, mobile app, desktop app, all of it. Everything just works. Its sync is out of this world—fluid, fast, and seamless across devices. You can use it on your phone, then move to your PC or laptop and continue instantly without friction. Unlimited message history and file storage are fantastic, and the bot platform is absurdly powerful. It’s boring in the best way, which is exactly what you want from a channel for interacting with your agents everywhere.
Odious is one of the most reserved words you could use to describe Telegram, which is primarily a host for scams that the influencers and other bottom feeders aren't allowed to monetize on the big social networks.
Telegram's bot API is literally one of the friendliest APIs (of any kind) I've ever seen. It's the first thing I reach for when server-to-mobile notifications are concerned.
It's just as easy to set up as ntfy.sh, except that it doesn't break every other week on iOS.
This is so true. I don’t like Telegram for a host of reasons, but the bot architecture is second to none. Try creating a bot in Slack. You’ll pull your hair out for hours. Same goes for Discord. Utter nightmare. Telegram? You send a DM and it is basically done.
Surprisingly large number of businesses run on whatsapp, as a consultant in Asia it's prob around half the businesses I've worked with prefer it over teams/slack. If Meta had been sensible about API access Telegram wouldn't have even got a foothold.
WhatsApp is actually more popular than Slack, isn’t it? In my country, almost everyone uses Slack, and I’ve hardly ever heard of any companies using WhatsApp, so that was surprising to me.
I'm bullish on Claude. It will see a surge in users, and will likely surpass Perplexity this year. However I don't think it will catch up to even Meta AI (which had 10x the number of users) this year.
You're telling me that Anthropic, one of the hottest companies on the planet right now couldn't field four teams of developers to integrate with Discord,
Slack, Telegram, and Teams? AI being such a productivity multiplier, seems like they could just choose to do it all. I mean, mythical man month and all that, but do it three times and have a retrospective and use Claude to refactor the pain points and centralize the learnings.
Telegram has a major issue with bots and bad actors though. They paywalled privacy features making it truly a terrible experience for users. 3-10 per day random messaging you.
Claude is leaning into the idea of a local "session" being the host where everything connects.
I guess this makes sense for now. You can build integrations leveraging the user's personal access credentials. Later, once Claude takes over the world, they can move sessions to live in their own walled garden.
They certainly are. And this is likely to some degree a response to enterprise security desires. Enterprise endpoints are locked down already - no need for extra external API security if it’s just the user’s desktop communication as usual.
It can. Go to the code tab, choose your repo, and have it write an image file to disk. If you tell it to read it, it should show in the chat. It works on the web version so hopefully it works on ios.
I just created agent-http that leverages the channels feature to enable you to wrap claude code with a http api. This provides an identical API to Agent API (https://github.com/coder/agentapi) that relies on terminal scraping to achieve this. Now you can interact with claude code in a headless manner using your subscription. Previously I think you had to do this via the Agents SDK which relies on api token use.
It would have surely taken less time to just set up notifications for the Claude Code app? Are they ever going to do this? It's baffling to me that they're just skipping over letting you know when a task is completed... this is basic stuff.
Personally I’m receiving native macOS notifications from Claude (both the app and the CLI), and there’s also the hook system, which you can script to send even more custom notifications.
It doesn't make sense that it's implemented for others but not for you. What platform are you running on? I have notifications on my Linux laptop and Linux desktop. But I did have to turn them on.
What these 'channels' do is essentially why I was running a nanoclaw at work: triggering a claude code based on events and getting feedback/review/analysis which nicely closes the loop with other agents.
Not sure why it has to be an mcp, but will be trying this out asap.
Claude Code Web does all of those things for me with the GitHub connector enabled. I did have a lot of song and dance to get the permissions right though.
Answer:
"I don't see a GitHub connector in the available integrations. The search only returned a Microsoft Learn connector (not connected).
It's possible the connector hasn't fully activated yet, or it may not be available in your current setup. Could you double-check in Settings → Integrations that it shows as connected?"
at this point anthropic is dogfooding us a new product every week just to see what might stick - doubt a lot of the features/products they've rolled out will actually be around or supported in a year
I've been looking to build something similar to this so this is very timely!
What I wanted to build is a way for Claude Code to automatically receive reviews and CP failures from a Github PR and automatically revise code and respond to comments. It looks like with a custom Github PR channel I can get very close to this, although I do wish that a channel can be opened in a running session instead of having to create a new one. Hopefully they add that soon.
I was making a telegram to Claude via tmux capture-pane and send-keys, this will be so much nicer. Also sounds like something that addresses some of what Steve Yegge said was missing for agent to agent communication as well.
I don't understand how this can be economically viable. If this takes off, it will allow businesses to use openclaw-like functionality at non-api prices (pro, max).
Do you know for sure if the pro / max plans are unprofitable at full usage? I did a brief back of the envelope calculation for minimax m2.5 comparing its api pricing to my token usage on a full quota max 20x Claude plan, it worked out around 260 ish which assuming some margin would put the Claude max around breakeven.
It doesn't matter if they are unprofitable at full usage, as long as there are enough users (like me!) who barely ever max out but still pay the $100/month. The people who love Claude Code enough to max out the 20x plan every day, that's probably the best influencer marketing campaign you could ever buy anyways.
been running something similar with openclaw for a while now - github webhooks triggering code review, slack messages kicking off tasks, etc. nice to see anthropic building this natively into claude code. the telegram/discord support is a smart call too, way more devs hang out there than people realize.
This looks super super useful.. I'm making an agent to agent chat tool (that I think is actually ready for testing, so please check it out) -- https://chat.corpo.llc/ or https://github.com/corpo/qntm -- and the difficulty of getting claude to check and respond to messages is real.
Basically the Claude CLI is the operating system is the product vibe I get right now.
finally! I'm building an app that's essentially a "sidecar" to an llm subscription and works via mcp and has a web ui to make reviewing deliverables easier, uses the user's subscription for intelligence instead of requiring to pay for tokens inside the app. The problem until now is I couldn't trigger AI work from the web ui, that limitation will be soon gone, it fixes a huge ux issue for me, I honestly thought it would happen sooner but I'm glad the industry is catching up.
I also get the impression this is way more complicated than it needs to be. Or maybe it's simple and they keep inventing new terminology for stuff that basically already exists. The crypto bros did the same shit. Like, bidirectional communication has been a thing for decades. We're just changing what we call the client and the server? And the protocol is just strings the bot on the other end is a little better at reading?
i dont like this class of criticism. mostly because i find myself do it alot. it doesnt matter if the tool used is simple, if it generates value then its a good idea
what should this fallacy be called? ad implementum? ad modum?
I was a little surprised to see a Telegram integration rather than Slack or Teams, given Anthropic's enterprise-first posture. But then I looked it up, and it turns out Telegram dwarfs both, at around 1bn MAUs, vs 50m and 300m respectively! I had no idea - reminds me of the time I found out Snapchat has 2x the userbase of Twitter.
Also, not a single one of those 300m Teams users wants to spend another minute there. Whereas people find Telegram useful and not odious.
Back in the day, when I used to play pokemon go, there was a small local community and we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.
Then I joined a group from a bigger city where I commuted for work. They had a telegram group chat with two "channels", one for talking, one for bot posts. The telegram bot could be sent a single screenshot of a raid, and it would use OCR to automatically generate an interactive UI for that raid for everyone to see, with all the relevant info, and it would also clear itself up when the raid is no longer relevant. You could press buttons to say you were going, that you MAYBE were going, if you were late, and if you already started/done it, all in single clicks. Tons of options, tons of information, all live updated.
I was bedazzled. That feature singlehandedly removed all attrition from urban social gaming. And it was entirely grassroots. It made me try out making my own telegram bots, and yeah, you basically have the power to make a little app in chat form, even some that feel like CLI commands.
It's been OVER HALF A DECADE and I have yet to see a single other chat application have that degree of freedom where it comes to applications and bots. Some like discord even did whole ass 100% reworks of their bot AP to support the likes of slash commands, and still fall short. And there's none worse than Teams. Teams hates you. Teams spent the prior 2 years before this one basically pointing a gun to our heads telling us they were removing webhooks and pushing back on it whenever they repeatedly get told that's the most insane and dogshit idea ever. And they still did it. There's just no spark in Teams UX. No self-respect. It's a soulless product made entirely as a dumping place of "synergy" with other M$ products. It's reciprocal, I hate it too.
Oh and my local group never go into telegram because they didn't want a new app. It died, but I still kept playing after work without problem. It makes me wonder how fast Teams would die if it wasn't proped up by 365 and Azure subscriptions.
> we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.
This kind of thing is so common in groups of people, it's one of my pet peeves. My own family does this in our group messages when trying to make big decisions like who should host thanksgiving or where we should go for a family vacation.
I make it a point to just take charge and tell people that we're doing XYZ now. It usually either results in a decision, or gets the discussion going enough that I can do it again with new information.
I wonder if Teams hates you, because they are doing the bidding of their actual customers (corporate decisions makers and purse holders), and those people's interests are not exactly aligned with the users'.
The problem is that these people holding the actual purse don't care enough about their subordinates' experience. They care about the price tag, and about compliance. Apparently the makers of Teams think about the same. None of them thinks in terms of lost productivity.
Yes, compliance is a big one. And it's not so much that they are actively hostile to user productivity (and quality of life), they just don't care enough.
I’ve been using Telegram for about 10 years, and it’s one of the few products that has consistently felt great the entire time. It’s fast everywhere: backend, mobile app, desktop app, all of it. Everything just works. Its sync is out of this world—fluid, fast, and seamless across devices. You can use it on your phone, then move to your PC or laptop and continue instantly without friction. Unlimited message history and file storage are fantastic, and the bot platform is absurdly powerful. It’s boring in the best way, which is exactly what you want from a channel for interacting with your agents everywhere.
My employer keeps Slack so locked down it is not really possible to use anything useful with it anyway…
Odious is one of the most reserved words you could use to describe Telegram, which is primarily a host for scams that the influencers and other bottom feeders aren't allowed to monetize on the big social networks.
Telegram's bot API is literally one of the friendliest APIs (of any kind) I've ever seen. It's the first thing I reach for when server-to-mobile notifications are concerned.
It's just as easy to set up as ntfy.sh, except that it doesn't break every other week on iOS.
Interesting. I set up a bunch of slack webhooks for server events that's been working decently well but maybe I'll look at telegram.
This is so true. I don’t like Telegram for a host of reasons, but the bot architecture is second to none. Try creating a bot in Slack. You’ll pull your hair out for hours. Same goes for Discord. Utter nightmare. Telegram? You send a DM and it is basically done.
Surprisingly large number of businesses run on whatsapp, as a consultant in Asia it's prob around half the businesses I've worked with prefer it over teams/slack. If Meta had been sensible about API access Telegram wouldn't have even got a foothold.
WhatsApp is actually more popular than Slack, isn’t it? In my country, almost everyone uses Slack, and I’ve hardly ever heard of any companies using WhatsApp, so that was surprising to me.
WhatsApp is more popular than Slack, Teams and Telegram combined. WhatsApp has something like 2-3 billion users worldwide
WhatsApp vs Slack + Teams is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison though.
south america and africa are both heavily invested in whatsapp in the business space.
A lot of such cases. Claude itself had (has?) fewer users than Perplexity, let alone Meta AI, Gemini or ChatGPT
no they definitely did not have fewer users than Perplexity xD
I like Claude, but polling done on Americans late last year shows otherwise:
https://epoch.ai/data/polling
Overseas numbers are likely worse for Claude.
Try and ask someone not in tech what they think of Claude or Anthropic. There's a high chance they've never heard of either.
Things might have changed with Anthropic showing up at the Superbowl, and in the news over their fight with the Pentagon.
Late last year is not the timeline you want. Anthropic’s hockey stick happened earlier this year.
Late last year was like 3 months ago.
I'm bullish on Claude. It will see a surge in users, and will likely surpass Perplexity this year. However I don't think it will catch up to even Meta AI (which had 10x the number of users) this year.
I’m aware of how long ago late 2025 was.
Anthropic’s revenue in Q1 2026 has skyrocketed.
Maybe most of users of anthropic are individual developers over employee in tech company.
I'm really happy that they choose telegram and discord.
You're telling me that Anthropic, one of the hottest companies on the planet right now couldn't field four teams of developers to integrate with Discord, Slack, Telegram, and Teams? AI being such a productivity multiplier, seems like they could just choose to do it all. I mean, mythical man month and all that, but do it three times and have a retrospective and use Claude to refactor the pain points and centralize the learnings.
You'd be surprised....
Turns out the companies making promises don’t exemplify the results of their promises lol
Telegram has a major issue with bots and bad actors though. They paywalled privacy features making it truly a terrible experience for users. 3-10 per day random messaging you.
Can't say I have had literally anyone ever message me on telegram. And I have been a daily user for years.
I get occasional spam - I'd guess it's because you've never joined a public group or shared your handle anywhere?
If you join public groups with a lot of users you end up on a bunch of spam lists and get smashed by bots.
Claude is leaning into the idea of a local "session" being the host where everything connects.
I guess this makes sense for now. You can build integrations leveraging the user's personal access credentials. Later, once Claude takes over the world, they can move sessions to live in their own walled garden.
They certainly are. And this is likely to some degree a response to enterprise security desires. Enterprise endpoints are locked down already - no need for extra external API security if it’s just the user’s desktop communication as usual.
I'd like Claude on IOS to pull/commit from a private git repository for Markdown and ideally drawio diagram editing.
It can. Go to the code tab, choose your repo, and have it write an image file to disk. If you tell it to read it, it should show in the chat. It works on the web version so hopefully it works on ios.
Claude Code for the web would be able to do that
At this point the limitation is even requiring a terminal in the first place.
Claude Code daemon mode in background when?
Just switch it to a background process with
Ctrl-Z $ bg
Or run it in tmux so you can pull it up on demand and have it open at startup.
They already have cloud environments you can use, though they're fragile as glass
I just created agent-http that leverages the channels feature to enable you to wrap claude code with a http api. This provides an identical API to Agent API (https://github.com/coder/agentapi) that relies on terminal scraping to achieve this. Now you can interact with claude code in a headless manner using your subscription. Previously I think you had to do this via the Agents SDK which relies on api token use.
It would have surely taken less time to just set up notifications for the Claude Code app? Are they ever going to do this? It's baffling to me that they're just skipping over letting you know when a task is completed... this is basic stuff.
What notifications are you missing specifically?
Personally I’m receiving native macOS notifications from Claude (both the app and the CLI), and there’s also the hook system, which you can script to send even more custom notifications.
What am I missing?
They appear to get turned on but then just never work on iOS for me. Hooks work fine, I use it to get a beep.
Anything to do with Code. Not on Mac or iOS, and not with local sessions or cloud sessions. Normal Claude chats send notifications fine.
This already exists for me on iOS? Maybe check your notification settings?
I’ve tried everything. Regular Claude chats notify me fine, but nothing from Code - neither a cloud session or remote control.
isn't that a completely different use case? messages to Claude from other sources vs from Claude when it's finished?
hooks can already alert you and have flexibility
that already exists
Not for me
It doesn't make sense that it's implemented for others but not for you. What platform are you running on? I have notifications on my Linux laptop and Linux desktop. But I did have to turn them on.
What these 'channels' do is essentially why I was running a nanoclaw at work: triggering a claude code based on events and getting feedback/review/analysis which nicely closes the loop with other agents.
Not sure why it has to be an mcp, but will be trying this out asap.
Claude caught up pretty quickly. I think OpenClaw’s core value is the channel, heartbeat, and the open-source ecosystem.
Yes -- this is getting very close to ClaudeClaw. Next they'll offer cloud hosting of persistent execution.
And unfortunately I think hearbeats are a little cost prohibitive. I burn through my plus plan with half hour cadence heartbeats checking email.
Heartbeat should be set to be a cheaper model.
I would rather they build something similar to openclaw than all these individual features that replicate functionality.
I mean you can just use /loop in both Claude Code and Codex for heartbeats.
I enabled the github connector in claude web interface.
I presumed Claude would then be able to clone repos, make commits, update the code in its container and then write it back to github.
Instead, the github connector does ..... nothing it all. It's very weird.
Claude Code Web does all of those things for me with the GitHub connector enabled. I did have a lot of song and dance to get the permissions right though.
Use GITHUB_TOKEN env var to give it gh access with the CLI. Or is gh not installed?
I'm using the web UI and its container.
My gh connnector half works in cc web. It clones ok but cant see gh comments.
It can do all those things from the claude code web version.
Quote:
"i enabled github connector can you see it?"
Answer: "I don't see a GitHub connector in the available integrations. The search only returned a Microsoft Learn connector (not connected). It's possible the connector hasn't fully activated yet, or it may not be available in your current setup. Could you double-check in Settings → Integrations that it shows as connected?"
Multiple such checks and re-setups do nothing.
at this point anthropic is dogfooding us a new product every week just to see what might stick - doubt a lot of the features/products they've rolled out will actually be around or supported in a year
But can it edit tabs? [1]
[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/11447
Gemini has similar bug https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/1028, that essentially made this tool absolutely unusable for me.
Never had this problem with Claude tho. Must be something environment-specific.
This feels like a response to openclaw (and openai's hiring of the lead).
I've been looking to build something similar to this so this is very timely!
What I wanted to build is a way for Claude Code to automatically receive reviews and CP failures from a Github PR and automatically revise code and respond to comments. It looks like with a custom Github PR channel I can get very close to this, although I do wish that a channel can be opened in a running session instead of having to create a new one. Hopefully they add that soon.
I was making a telegram to Claude via tmux capture-pane and send-keys, this will be so much nicer. Also sounds like something that addresses some of what Steve Yegge said was missing for agent to agent communication as well.
It’s quite basic if I am using it correctly! It expects certain commands to be still approved on main machine.
I don't understand how this can be economically viable. If this takes off, it will allow businesses to use openclaw-like functionality at non-api prices (pro, max).
Do you know for sure if the pro / max plans are unprofitable at full usage? I did a brief back of the envelope calculation for minimax m2.5 comparing its api pricing to my token usage on a full quota max 20x Claude plan, it worked out around 260 ish which assuming some margin would put the Claude max around breakeven.
It doesn't matter if they are unprofitable at full usage, as long as there are enough users (like me!) who barely ever max out but still pay the $100/month. The people who love Claude Code enough to max out the 20x plan every day, that's probably the best influencer marketing campaign you could ever buy anyways.
Anthropic previously shared that they make ~60% margin on API access. So they're losing money on plan whales.
Very cool!
However, once remote capabilities are added to any software, it is virtually guaranteed that they will eventually be exploited as backdoors.
This means enterprise security solutions will need to develop the capability to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate Claude Code instances.
Claude getting clawed.
this is exactly i thought!
This is exactly what I planned to figure out how to do: maintain an instance of Claude that can accept triggers that become tasks.
Claw-ification
been running something similar with openclaw for a while now - github webhooks triggering code review, slack messages kicking off tasks, etc. nice to see anthropic building this natively into claude code. the telegram/discord support is a smart call too, way more devs hang out there than people realize.
Interesting to see it took them so long to implement this. Claude was super limiting without the ability to have a scheduler or a connection to events
This looks super super useful.. I'm making an agent to agent chat tool (that I think is actually ready for testing, so please check it out) -- https://chat.corpo.llc/ or https://github.com/corpo/qntm -- and the difficulty of getting claude to check and respond to messages is real.
Basically the Claude CLI is the operating system is the product vibe I get right now.
Gosh darn it: github.com/corpollc/qntm. NOT corpo/qntm.
github unavailable; what you think would be the primary usecase for agent to agent chat?
People be doing the most-unnecessary things. Your agents do not need to chat with eachother. You actually dont need agents. Its retarded.
Really surprised for the frequent innovation of Anthropic
For a suitable value of “innovation”.
we have OpenClaw at home
(and it may be better)
finally! I'm building an app that's essentially a "sidecar" to an llm subscription and works via mcp and has a web ui to make reviewing deliverables easier, uses the user's subscription for intelligence instead of requiring to pay for tokens inside the app. The problem until now is I couldn't trigger AI work from the web ui, that limitation will be soon gone, it fixes a huge ux issue for me, I honestly thought it would happen sooner but I'm glad the industry is catching up.
I also get the impression this is way more complicated than it needs to be. Or maybe it's simple and they keep inventing new terminology for stuff that basically already exists. The crypto bros did the same shit. Like, bidirectional communication has been a thing for decades. We're just changing what we call the client and the server? And the protocol is just strings the bot on the other end is a little better at reading?
OpenClaw approach has moved into frontier companies I see -
yes! its all happening
Imagine if they were able to support iMessage.
so its a webhook
i dont like this class of criticism. mostly because i find myself do it alot. it doesnt matter if the tool used is simple, if it generates value then its a good idea
what should this fallacy be called? ad implementum? ad modum?
the truth?
it's a webhook ... as MCP!