Slack workflows as duct tape
A workflow we've wanted for a long time at Buttondown: throw a random paper cut or complaint into a Slack channel, and get a nicely formatted Linear issue out the other end.
This is not a novel desire. Linear offers it out of the box via Linear Asks — on the enterprise plan. I am a cheapskate, and I could not justify a couple hundred extra dollars a month for this one thing. So I set out to jerry-rig it myself.
The answer is honestly kind of funny, and kind of sad. Behold:
And it works!
Ideally this is the sort of thing Slack's workflow builder does natively, and my bar was low: I needed neither polish nor perfection but simple mechanical routing. The blocker is in identity mapping, as far as I can tell: the Slack–Linear integration has no canonical way to map a given Slack user to a given Linear user, and I want every reported issue assigned to the person who reported it.
(That requirement is probably a liability at a larger company. If you have forty engineers and a real code-ownership graph, "assign it to whoever complained" is exactly the wrong default; you want triage, routing, et cetera. We are thankfully, blissfully unaware of such problems thus far. The person who notices the paper cut is, nine times out of ten, the person who should fix it.)
So: duct tape.
