version: "1.0.0" name: slack-to-things description: Turn saved Slack messages (Xero Limited workspace) into Things to-dos, one per saved message. Use when the user asks to process, clear, triage, or convert their Slack "Saved Items" into Things tasks.

slack-to-things

Creates one Things to-do per saved Slack message, filed under the "🔵 Xero" area, then reports what was done. It does not remove messages from Slack Saved Items — see Limitations.

Prerequisites

• Slack MCP tools (slack_search_public_and_private, etc.) connected and scoped to the Xero Limited workspace (xero.enterprise.slack.com).
• things CLI available and authorized for writes (things auth already run / THINGS_AUTH_TOKEN set).
• Things area "🔵 Xero" exists — UUID WrtEFeQWntcqSutKmcmcUh. If title lookup ever fails or is ambiguous, target this UUID directly via --list-id (or resolve the current flag name with things add --help).

Workflow

1. Find saved messages. Call slack_search_public_and_private with query="is:saved", content_types="messages". Page through with the returned cursor until no more pages. For each hit, capture:

• Sender display name (the From: field, name only — drop the email/ID)
• Permalink (the Permalink: field)
• Message text — the top-level Text: field only. Ignore Context before:/Context after: (those are surrounding messages, not the saved one).
• Skip hits with no usable text (e.g. file-only saves) and note them for the final report.

1. Sanity-check the response before creating anything. A bare is:saved query never reports "No results found." When the saved list is empty, the modifier stops constraining the query and the search degenerates into an unconstrained match-all returned in recency order — i.e. the last N messages indexed anywhere the user can see. Creating tasks from that would generate pure junk.

Treat the response as "saved list is empty" — create nothing, report it, and stop — when:

• the newest result is within ~2 minutes of now, and the whole batch spans only a few minutes.

Corroborating tells (any of these alongside the above makes it certain): the result count lands exactly on the requested limit with a next-page cursor present; many results have an empty Text: field; results come from alert/deploy/ops channels (*-alerts, *-sev*-*, deploytrack-*, *-releases, *-notifications).

A genuine saved list looks the opposite: results scattered across days or weeks, count comfortably under the limit, End of results - No more pages available, human senders, substantive text.

Do not try to detect this by adding a term to the query — is:saved <nonsense-term> returns a clean empty result, so it can't distinguish the two cases. The timestamp-clustering check above is the reliable signal.

1. Skip already-processed messages. Before creating a task, check whether a Things to-do already references this permalink:

`` things tasks --query 'notes:/<permalink, regex-escaped>/' --json `` If any result comes back, skip this message (already handled on a prior run) and count it as "skipped — duplicate".

1. Create a Things to-do for each remaining message. Build the title and notes, then pipe through stdin via a quoted heredoc — this is required, not optional: Slack message text is untrusted external content and may contain backticks, $(...), quotes, etc. A quoted delimiter ('EOF') prevents the shell from expanding any of that.

```bash things add --list "🔵 Xero" -- - <<'EOF' Review Slack 💬 message from <Sender Name>

<permalink>

<message text> EOF ```

(First line becomes the title, the rest becomes the notes — see things add --help.)

1. Report a summary: how many to-dos were created, how many were skipped as duplicates, and any messages that couldn't be parsed (with their permalinks) so the user can handle those by hand.

Limitations

• No auto-unsave. No Slack tool available in this environment can remove an item from Saved Items (it's not part of Slack's public API surface here). Processed messages stay saved — clear them manually in Slack once you've confirmed the Things tasks look right. If a Slack tool with save/unsave support becomes available later, this step can be added.
• Removal is what clears an item, not completion. In Slack's Later panel, use "Remove from saved items" — observed behaviour suggests marking an item complete may leave it in is:saved results. Completing the matching Things to-do has no effect on Slack either; the two systems are unlinked.
• Empty saved list is indistinguishable from a bad query without the step-2 check. See step 2 — this is the highest-risk failure mode in the whole workflow, since the fallback response looks superficially like a large batch of real work.
• No thread context. If a saved message is a thread reply, only its own text is captured — the parent message is not pulled in.
• Messages only, not file-only saves (the is:saved filter is a message search modifier).