Building ToadBot Core: How We Upgraded Our Slack Kudos Bot with AgentCore

Last week (October 8th–10th), Metal Toad held its semiannual Hackathon. My team took on the challenge of modernizing one of our internal tools: ToadBot2, our Slack bot for giving shoutouts and kudos to teammates.

1.  Giving shoutouts to multiple people at once
2. Adding kudos to past shoutouts, not just the most recent ones
3. Keeping the channel cleaner by moving related messages into threads
4. And as a bonus — some fun easter eggs triggered by specific emoji reactions 🐸

This was my first time working with AgentCore and Slack bots, and it was an amazing learning experience. Our team worked incredibly well together, with everyone playing a key part in the process.While the bot still has a few bugs to squash 🪲 and some extra HR-friendly features we’d love to add (like weekly and monthly summaries), I’m thrilled to share that the project was approved by the company! So soon, we might officially move from ToadBot2 to ToadBot Core 🎉

And yes, I wrote this post first and then asked ChatGPT to sprinkle a bit of AI magic on it, staying true to the Hackathon’s theme of AI Modernization 🤖💡Thanks to (pretend i'm tagging them here) Nathan, David, Ingrid and Calliandra for the hard work!