feat(experiment): prompt create shows more example templates and agents by zimeg · Pull Request #402 · slackapi/slack-cli

zimeg · 2026-03-16T03:46:55Z

Changelog

N/A - Some updates to the experiments page though! 🧪 ✨

Summary

This PR prompts create to show more starter templates, list "typescript" projects, and show agentic examples. This includes:

Enterprise Search templates
Blank templates
MCP server template
Casey the IT helpdesk agent 👾

We include this behind a new "templates" experiment until templates have matching framework support and examples are made public.

Preview

📸 Starter templates:

🤖 Agent examples:

Requirements

I've read and understood the Contributing Guidelines and have done my best effort to follow them.
I've read and agree to the Code of Conduct.

codecov · 2026-03-16T04:05:11Z

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 80.08475% with 47 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.
⚠️ Please upload report for BASE (main@f23e6d3). Learn more about missing BASE report.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
cmd/project/create_template.go	83.17%	25 Missing and 11 partials ⚠️
cmd/project/create_samples.go	50.00%	5 Missing and 2 partials ⚠️
internal/pkg/create/template.go	0.00%	4 Missing ⚠️

Additional details and impacted files

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##             main     #402   +/-   ##
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  Coverage        ?   68.05%           
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  Files           ?      217           
  Lines           ?    18193           
  Branches        ?        0           
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  Hits            ?    12382           
  Misses          ?     4650           
  Partials        ?     1161

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zimeg

💌 Leaving a few comments and questions ahead for future reviewers!

zimeg · 2026-03-16T03:50:17Z

cmd/project/create_samples.go

+	languageOptions := []string{
+		fmt.Sprintf("Bolt for JavaScript %s", style.Secondary("Node.js")),
+		fmt.Sprintf("Bolt for Python %s", style.Secondary("Python")),
+		fmt.Sprintf("Deno Slack SDK %s", style.Secondary("Deno")),
+	}
+	if clients.Config.WithExperimentOn(experiment.Templates) {
+		languageOptions = []string{
+			"Bolt for JavaScript",
+			"Bolt for Python",
+			"Deno Slack SDK",
+		}
+	}


🔭 note: Toward confusion of #325 we focused on on a "framework" selection here - @srtaalej!

🐣 ramble: The samples command has the following flag option too but IMHO the prompt it supports feels unexpected. Perhaps it's changed to "framework" soon?

--language string runtime for the app framework ex: "deno", "node", "python"

i like framework!

Agreed, I've often felt "language" was a poor choice. We went with it back when Deno was the only choice. Now, it feels like we're choosing frameworks not languages.

question: In the spirit of focus around a survey-to-huh migration, can we consider keeping parity between the 2 prompts? Change it to framework in both places or consider doing the framework change AFTER we release the huh migration.

zimeg · 2026-03-16T03:52:40Z

cmd/project/create_template.go

 		categoryID = "slack-cli#getting-started"
 	}

-	// App categories and templates


🪓 note: This comment is removed in favor of godoc above.

zimeg · 2026-03-16T03:55:46Z

cmd/project/create_template.go

 	"github.com/spf13/cobra"
 )

+// getSelectionOptions returns the app template options for a given category.


🪬 thought: The changes of this PR make me think of the create selections now as:

Category: Choice of template, agent, or sample

Scaffold: Feature focused examples

Framework: Code implementation details

zimeg · 2026-03-16T03:58:31Z

cmd/project/create_template.go

+				{
+					Title:       "Custom agent",
+					Description: "Minimal setup with the Slack MCP server",
+					Repository:  "slack-cli#ai-apps/mcp-server",
+				},


🔍 note: We can perhaps make effort to feature this as the agent starter template with a minimal event listener, action listener, and agentic loop to be compliment to the quickstart:

📚 https://docs.slack.dev/tools/bolt-js/getting-started

👾 question: Does this seem like the right separation with the assistant template below? I understand that "Casey" might be more useful to known cases and demonstrates adjacent frameworks also?

The Slack MCP Server sample app is fine as a choice for now, but I think we'll need release Starter Agent templates that use our chosen Agent Frameworks and LLM Providers.

zimeg · 2026-03-16T04:02:59Z

cmd/project/create_template.go

+			return create.Template{}, slackerror.New(slackerror.ErrInvalidArgs).
+				WithMessage("The %s category was not found", categoryShortcut)


⚠️ note: This case should never happen, but we might want to guard against prompting for a category if a shortcut is provided using this!

zimeg · 2026-03-16T04:08:54Z

cmd/project/create_template.go

+		categories = []categoryInfo{
+			{id: "slack-cli#starter-templates/getting-started", name: "Starter templates"},
+			{id: "slack-cli#starter-templates/automation-apps", name: "Automation templates"},
+			{id: "slack-cli#starter-templates/search-template", name: "Search templates"},
+			{id: "slack-cli#starter-templates/blank-template", name: "Blank templates"},
+			{id: "slack-cli#ai-apps/support-agent", name: "Support agent"},
+			{id: "slack-cli#ai-apps/mcp-server", name: "Custom agent"},
+			{id: "slack-cli#ai-apps/assistant-template", name: "Assistant templates"},
+		}


🎨 note: Preview of an extended list:

zimeg · 2026-03-16T04:09:50Z

internal/iostreams/charm.go

🤡 note: These changes are with #400 also!

zimeg · 2026-03-16T04:10:22Z

internal/iostreams/survey.go

🪵 note: This file is updated in #400 and included here for demo purposes.

zimeg · 2026-03-16T04:11:02Z

internal/style/style.go

🍰 note: The emoji related changes are also toward #400 changes!

zimeg · 2026-03-16T04:12:29Z

cmd/project/create_samples.go

+	selectOptions := make([]string, len(sortedRepos))
+	for i, r := range sortedRepos {
+		if !clients.Config.WithExperimentOn(experiment.Charm) {
+			selectOptions[i] = fmt.Sprint(i+1, ". ", r.Name)
+		} else {
+			selectOptions[i] = r.Name
+		}
+	}


👁️‍🗨️ note: The remaining changes of this file exist in #400!

…experiment # Conflicts: # cmd/project/create_template.go

mwbrooks

thought: Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about this @zimeg. It took me a couple attempts at slack create -e templates to understand what is happening.

It feels like everything has now became a Starter Template, which I sorta understand where it's coming from, but it's adding a second layer of complexity that doesn't feel right to me.

For example, following this design I'd argue that the "Agent Custom App" is actually the "Agent Starter App" which should go under "Starter App" category. Of course, that isn't the experience that we want.

Personally, I'd prefer to keep our create experience as-is (production) while only adding the multiple choices to the type of Agent Apps that a developer can choose from (Starter Agent and Support Agent, for now).

I don't think we're ready to introduce new app choices to the create screen - Blank, Search, etc. It's something we want, but I think we should take a beat to think about the design and experience outside of a PR that is focused on introducing the Starter Agent templates.

mwbrooks · 2026-03-17T04:55:06Z

cmd/project/create_samples.go

+	languagePrompt := "Select a language:"
+	if clients.Config.WithExperimentOn(experiment.Templates) {
+		languagePrompt = "Select a framework:"
+	}


note: This is fine and I appreciate the improvement. But I'll plead for ya'll to try to keep the focus on a survey-to-huh migration without introducing other changes.

The more changes, the more to review, the longer it takes to release the experiment, and the harder it is to feel confident in the release.

I'd suggest keeping a list of improvements like switching language to framework and do it as follow-ups after releasing the survey-to-huh migration. Changing "Language" to "Framework" should also update/alias our --language flag and update any internal Golang references.

mwbrooks · 2026-03-17T04:57:53Z

cmd/project/create_template.go

+// getFrameworkOptions returns the framework choices for a given template
+// selection.
+//
+// The order of entries should match the unfolded selection order for sake of
+// new entries. This is not an implementation requirement.
+func getFrameworkOptions(template string) []promptObject {


nit: Again, nice to have but this feels like something that could come after we release the survey-to-huh experiment.

mwbrooks · 2026-03-17T04:59:55Z

cmd/project/create_template.go

 		promptForCategory := "Select an app:"
+		if clients.Config.WithExperimentOn(experiment.Templates) {
+			promptForCategory = "Select a category:"


nit: Again, the drift between survey and huh while under experiment feels wrong to me. I understand it's just a title, but I'd rather see the focus on migrating one dependency to another, instead of changing the UX. If we do change the UX, please change it for both survey and huh (and any internals).

zimeg added 3 commits March 14, 2026 22:13

revert(experiment): seperate create questions with flag parsings

42aeefd

feat(experiment): inline sample descriptions in plain text

716cffb

feat(experiment): prompt create shows more example templates and agents

cd63d76

zimeg added this to the Next Release milestone Mar 16, 2026

zimeg self-assigned this Mar 16, 2026

zimeg requested review from a team as code owners March 16, 2026 03:46

zimeg added enhancement M-T: A feature request for new functionality experiment Experimental feature accessed behind the --experiment flag or toggle semver:patch Use on pull requests to describe the release version increment labels Mar 16, 2026

zimeg changed the base branch from main to zimeg-revert-multistep-create March 16, 2026 03:51

zimeg commented Mar 16, 2026

View reviewed changes

Base automatically changed from zimeg-revert-multistep-create to main March 17, 2026 04:12

Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main' into zimeg-feat-templates-…

d63f851

…experiment # Conflicts: # cmd/project/create_template.go

zimeg linked an issue Mar 17, 2026 that may be closed by this pull request

"create" command secondaries display language twice #325

Open

3 tasks

mwbrooks reviewed Mar 17, 2026

View reviewed changes

		return create.Template{}, slackerror.New(slackerror.ErrInvalidArgs).
		WithMessage("The %s category was not found", categoryShortcut)

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zimeg commented Mar 16, 2026

Changelog

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codecov bot commented Mar 16, 2026 •

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