Multiplayer AI: Why your team (and its agents) need a group chat

Ryan Donovan (0:09)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I'm your host, Ryan Donovan. And today we have a special episode sponsored by the fine folks at Slack, talking about multiplayer AI coding and how they are enabling changes in the SDLC to support that.

My guest for that is the GM over at Slack, Rob Seaman. Welcome to the show, Rob.

Rob Seaman (0:34)

How are you, Ryan? Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Ryan Donovan (0:37)

That's my pleasure. So before we get into the topic today, can you give us a little quick flyover of how you got into software and technology?

Rob Seaman (0:46)

It's been a long time. I'm feeling good, especially getting old at this point.

I started in technology during the.com boom, for those of us that were around in the late 90s, when everybody was moving everything online. I actually started as a post-sales consultant at a software company called Siebel, and it was doing implementations. And honestly did a hack around the product, and the product team asked me to come be a product manager and make it a feature. And I was 22 at the time, and it was just one of those lucky moments in my career. The person that asked me is now the CEO of GameSight. His name is Chuck Anapothe, and he's still a mentor to this day. So anyway, I got lucky, got asked to join Product, and basically stumbled into the career I've loved, and industry that I've loved, and that's kind of defined my entire career. Nice.

Ryan Donovan (1:36)

So today we're talking about multiplayer AI. Something I've sort of heard recently, tossed back and forth. What does that mean, and why should developers care about it?

Rob Seaman (1:47)

Yeah, you are hearing about it in multiple places. I think one of the seminal pieces actually written on it was written by Toby, look at the CEO of Shopify.

For the listeners out there, go check out his piece called Learning on the Shop Floor that he published on Twitter. I think it's amazing, and it talks about all the benefits of multiplayer. But I think we have an interesting role to play in that at Slack. But the benefits of multiplayer to me, or let me maybe define it first, and then talk a bit about the benefits.

If you look at most of the AI tools that are out there today, they're largely single-player, meaning a single human sitting in a terminal or a SAS chat interface, prompting an agent on their own. And there's a ton of benefit for that. We've all realized individual productivity gains in our personal lives, in our professional lives. But the downside risk of that in a corporate scenario is that the AI learns and the individual learns, but the individual's peers and the rest of the company doesn't learn from the experience that person is having with the AI, right? And I think there's a ton of exhaust, the exhaust from those interactions that can become knowledge artifacts and basically make entire teams and companies operate much faster. And to me, multiplayer AI is taking it out of that individual terminal or that SaaS chat window and putting it into a multiplayer space, like a channel in Slack, where people can work with the AI together and see what each other are doing and learn from each other's past experiences with the AI. So I think the most powerful thing about multiplayer AI is actually the exhaust of the interaction, becoming a knowledge artifact for the rest of the company and effectively disseminating everything that's happening with AI within a company just like that overnight.

Ryan Donovan (3:32)

Yeah. I mean, engineering has always had a sort of a paradigm of pair programming, right? As a way to educate and collaborate. Are we talking to something like that with a couple of folks in a channel, with an AI agent as a backpack, or how multiplayer are we getting here?

Rob Seaman (3:50)

Yeah. I mean, it can be theoretically infinitely people in a channel doing it, but it's typically a handful. The way that we're doing it at Slack right now is we'll pull our coding agent into what we call Code Channels, the new product that we've launched. And it could be a couple of engineers, like in many cases, like I start something, or a product manager or designer starts something. We'll get to the point that we have a PR and then we'll pull in an engineer and be like, okay, we're not computer scientists, right? Obviously, you should take a look at it if you think. I think over time, it's going to improve the overall quality of services and reduce duplication. We can frankly search and see much more of the coding that's happening across the company at this point. We're addressing issues that previously would have gone on to backlogs and not actually got addressed.