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.
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.
I think it might because telegram integration it's just easy to do, I don't use telegram for actually messaging, I use it just to deploy my bots, it's a simple way to build simple tools, in a few lines you can get something working, you can have commands that work like buttons, accept images, respond with images and don't need anything else than your telegram account
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.
It's not even funny how a multibillion-dollar company with thousands of employees having unlimited access to the "world's best coding models" lags behind a small one-man [1] open source project that already had multiple plugins for the same feature [2] for months.
Pi already has 700+ third-party packages [2] for various purposes of various quality. But it doesn't matter, since creating a new working Pi extension to suit your needs is just a prompt away, and you don't even have to restart your coding session.
Telegram has the best programmatic integration. Trivial to get working. You can be up and running in minutes. I use it to talk to a claw-style agent and it's truly unbelievable what you get for free.
Apples and oranges comparison, one is a messaging app, the other two are used for communication and collaboration across teams in a workspace. I have worked in 5+ companies who used either Slack and Teams, none used Telegram for any comms.
Telegram is 'bot friendly' since the beginning, gaining a lot of users with crypto boom a decade ago with coin drops and things like that, so it is very good to develop for, but I have your initial sentiment first - shame this hasn't launched with tools people actually use for work.
One issue is that 95% of the integrations will be fine with the default configuration. The others including some with high profit potential will have weird configs that will frustrate your customers the first time they try if not well tested/documented. It's better to take time and get it right. Enterprise customers love piloting and spending time, so best to approach that the right way too. Going with less complex options, that arguably have better APIs, makes it easier to develop your core product too and get real feedback from users.
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.
Telegram is more popular among "normal people", and it also has a laissez-faire attitude towards bots and bot development. Making a bot that you, or even other people, could add to their contact list and use is pretty easy.
It's wild, but "people who want to build and run their own one-off bot for something like home automation" are almost treated by Telegram like first class citizens.
Not really a meaningful comparison. Telegram is a personal messenger while Slack and Teams are for work. Telegram should be put alongside WhatsApp, iMessage, WeChat etc., which all have user bases in the billions.
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.
This is actually great for *claws. When Anthropic changed their T&Cs to disallow using claude code oauth tokens in the Anthropic Agent SDK, you had a choice between violate the terms or pay a lot more for the model inference using an API key from platform.claude.com instead of claude.ai.
With this change, it looks like an officially sanctioned version of *claws. Connecting to whatever "channels" you want via MCP.
Architecturally it's a little different, most *claws would call the Agent SDK from some orchestrator, but with claude channels the claude code binary starts the MCP server used to communicate with the channel. So it's a full inversion of control where Claude code is the driver, instead of your orchestrator code.
I updated my nanoclaw fork to start the claude code binary in a docker container on PID 1, and you can read the docker logs straight from claude code stdout, but with comms directly to/from your channel of choice. It's pretty neat.
The convenient thing about using Claude via Telegram is that you can provide all of your private and proprietary information to US intelligence and Russian intelligence at the same time. (Telegram is not end to end encrypted.)
I’ve been using opencode’s server command as a systemd unit on my home server. I connect to it with the desktop and mobile client. Use it for a bunch of openclaw-esq things, but with a nicer interface.
I think CC does have “remote control” now which I think would work similar, but it’s Max only right now
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.
I am not sure how I feel about all these hype-driven tools honestly, especially considering they are super janky since probably rushed out with Claude Code.
It reminds me that I don't really like Anthropic as a company, I just like Claude as a model a lot. It just feels more capable and personable than the others. I wonder if / when OpenAI et al. will be able to replicate it.
For now, I basically have no choice but to use the walled garden but I do hope Anthropic is not completely compromising their core mission of actually making the model better rather than following these public bandwagons.
Then again most of these probably take them like a day to develop through a junior dev talking to Claude Opus 5 or some shit lol (and to be fair, it shows). I don't know.
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.
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 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.
Nice, i've been waiting for this capability to show up. I've added support to my side project llmsg.com, here's a video of it in action https://x.com/sho/status/2034898928618152412
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.
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.
This is fantastic. There are a ton of use cases where you'd want to be able to build an integration that hooks back to your running agent session. OpenClaw has this today, but it's pretty janky. Hopefully this is coming to Claude Cowork as well.
My use case is that I have a separate system that provides human approvals for what my agent can do. Right now, I've had to resort to long-polling to give a halfway decent user experience. But webhooks are clearly the right solution. Curious to see how it ends up being exposed outside of these initial integrations.
[+] [-] ainch|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] jen729w|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] miki123211|7 days ago|reply
It's just as easy to set up as ntfy.sh, except that it doesn't break every other week on iOS.
[+] [-] kelvinjps10|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] beoberha|7 days ago|reply
iMessage is proprietary. WhatsApp charges you. Unofficial APIs exist, sure, but not my cup of tea.
Then you have Discord or Slack, which are pretty heavyweight when all you want is a simple chat interface.
Telegram makes it SO easy. Bots are first class resources on Telegram and they make them so easy to use.
[+] [-] karlitooo|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] miroljub|7 days ago|reply
Pi already has 700+ third-party packages [2] for various purposes of various quality. But it doesn't matter, since creating a new working Pi extension to suit your needs is just a prompt away, and you don't even have to restart your coding session.
[1] Pi Coding Agent https://pi.dev [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@e9n/pi-channels [3] https://pi.dev/packages
[+] [-] arjie|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] elAhmo|6 days ago|reply
Telegram is 'bot friendly' since the beginning, gaining a lot of users with crypto boom a decade ago with coin drops and things like that, so it is very good to develop for, but I have your initial sentiment first - shame this hasn't launched with tools people actually use for work.
And no, Discord is not used for that either.
[+] [-] moostee|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] zerkten|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] yen223|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] revlolz|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] ACCount37|7 days ago|reply
It's wild, but "people who want to build and run their own one-off bot for something like home automation" are almost treated by Telegram like first class citizens.
[+] [-] informal007|7 days ago|reply
I'm really happy that they choose telegram and discord.
[+] [-] paxys|6 days ago|reply
[+] [-] alexjurkiewicz|7 days ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zknill|6 days ago|reply
With this change, it looks like an officially sanctioned version of *claws. Connecting to whatever "channels" you want via MCP.
Architecturally it's a little different, most *claws would call the Agent SDK from some orchestrator, but with claude channels the claude code binary starts the MCP server used to communicate with the channel. So it's a full inversion of control where Claude code is the driver, instead of your orchestrator code.
I updated my nanoclaw fork to start the claude code binary in a docker container on PID 1, and you can read the docker logs straight from claude code stdout, but with comms directly to/from your channel of choice. It's pretty neat.
[+] [-] sneak|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] 2001zhaozhao|7 days ago|reply
Claude Code daemon mode in background when?
[+] [-] theParadox42|7 days ago|reply
Ctrl-Z $ bg
Or run it in tmux so you can pull it up on demand and have it open at startup.
[+] [-] dbbk|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] ramraj07|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] Evan-Purkhiser|7 days ago|reply
I think CC does have “remote control” now which I think would work similar, but it’s Max only right now
[+] [-] unknown|7 days ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ai_fry_ur_brain|7 days ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ewidar|7 days ago|reply
Not sure why it has to be an mcp, but will be trying this out asap.
[+] [-] vanillameow|7 days ago|reply
It reminds me that I don't really like Anthropic as a company, I just like Claude as a model a lot. It just feels more capable and personable than the others. I wonder if / when OpenAI et al. will be able to replicate it.
For now, I basically have no choice but to use the walled garden but I do hope Anthropic is not completely compromising their core mission of actually making the model better rather than following these public bandwagons.
Then again most of these probably take them like a day to develop through a junior dev talking to Claude Opus 5 or some shit lol (and to be fair, it shows). I don't know.
[+] [-] killme2008|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] awwaiid|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] operatingthetan|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] lxgr|6 days ago|reply
The code/product itself is an absolute nightmare of overengineering, riddled with bugs and undocumented behavior changes across versions.
[+] [-] sanex|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] tekacs|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] mberg|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] mberg|6 days ago|reply
[+] [-] sunnybeetroot|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] anthonySs|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] mmaunder|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] _pdp_|7 days ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wewewedxfgdf|7 days ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ed_mercer|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] tpt2|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] sho|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] dbbk|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] zerd|7 days ago|reply
[+] [-] ericlevine|7 days ago|reply
My use case is that I have a separate system that provides human approvals for what my agent can do. Right now, I've had to resort to long-polling to give a halfway decent user experience. But webhooks are clearly the right solution. Curious to see how it ends up being exposed outside of these initial integrations.
[+] [-] hmartin|7 days ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/11447
[+] [-] ekropotin|7 days ago|reply
Never had this problem with Claude tho. Must be something environment-specific.
[+] [-] alexovch|6 days ago|reply
Not having to restart or rebuild context every time makes a big difference once systems get more stateful.