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Overview

Annie Automation (URL: /automation, formerly /instructions) is where you teach Annie how to act on her own. When a message lands in Slack from a tracked source, Annie runs through your rules top-to-bottom and picks an action: a quick chat reply, a full Root-Cause Analysis (RCA), waiting for a human, or staying silent. The page is divided into three scopes:
  • Message routing (live today): the rules engine described in this doc.
  • Scheduled tasks (coming soon): standups, weekly reports, on-call handoffs.
  • Custom skills (coming soon): ad-hoc skills triggered by @Annie, do X.

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How a message flows through Annie

  1. Message lands: a tracked Slack identity posts in a tracked channel, or a teammate @-mentions Annie.
  2. Skip duplicates: if the same alert fired recently (within the duplicate-detection window), Annie links to the existing investigation instead of starting a new one.
  3. Match a rule: Annie evaluates rules top-to-bottom; the first matching rule wins.
  4. Default behavior: if no rule matches, Annie reads the message and picks the right response based on context.

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Default behavior

Annie’s default behavior is fixed as “Annie decides”: when no rule matches, Annie reads the message and chooses between a quick chat reply, a deeper investigation, or staying silent based on context. This is intentionally not configurable. To get a different action for specific cases, add a rule below the default behavior card.

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Rules

A rule tells Annie what to do for a specific message. Each rule is built from four steps:
WHEN a Slack message matches WHO, WHAT, and WHERE below, Annie does what you set in THEN.
Below the stepper, a live preview chip reads the values back as a sentence (“Annie will run a full investigation when PagerDuty posts severity:critical in #oncall”) so you can sanity-check the rule before saving.

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Action types

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Templates

The rules section opens with three starter recipes you can click to pre-fill the editor:
  • Auto-investigate critical pages — severity:critical → Run RCA.
  • Mute a noisy bot — Stay silent. Pick the bot in WHO.
  • Manual RCA in a noisy channel — Wait for human. Pick the channel in WHERE.
Templates only seed the action and trigger. You fill WHO and WHERE for your project before saving.

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Reordering rules

Each row has a drag handle on the left (grip icon) and ↑/↓ arrows on the right. Reordering matters: Annie evaluates top-to-bottom, first match wins.

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Duplicate

The copy icon on each row opens a new-rule editor pre-filled with that rule’s WHO/WHAT/WHERE/THEN. Tweak and save. Useful for forking a rule for a near-identical case without retyping.

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Grouped views

The Rules section has a 3-way pivot in the top-right (Sender / Channel / Flat).
  • Sender: one card per subscribed Slack identity. Each card shows that sender’s rules and a per-group fallback dropdown (see below). A multi-select rule scoped to several senders appears under each of them.
  • Channel: one card per Slack channel mapping, same shape.
  • Flat: the linear list, drag-sortable, ordered by order_index.
Default pivot is computed from the project’s rule shape: clusters of rules sharing a sender → Sender; clusters sharing a channel → Channel; small or all-distinct → Flat. Your override is remembered per project, per user.

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Per-group fallback (the “Jean-Marc fix”)

When you subscribe a bot to Annie, every message from that bot is processed automatically. Without the per-group fallback, any message from that bot that didn’t match a rule would fall through to Annie’s default behavior — sometimes that’s the right call, often it’s not. The per-group fallback closes that loop. Each sender card has an inline dropdown at the bottom:
Otherwise (no rule above matched), Annie will [stay silent ▾]
Subscribed senders default to stay silent. Mention-only senders default to Annie decides. Channels default to stay silent. The dropdown writes through to PUT /custom-instructions/{projectId}/group-fallbacks/{kind}/{scopeId} immediately. Behaviour at evaluation time, when no rule matches:
  1. Per-sender override wins if set.
  2. Per-channel override wins next.
  3. For subscribed senders without an override row, Annie applies the implicit silent default (the retroactive fix).
  4. Otherwise, Annie’s global default behavior fires.

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”Anyone” and “Any channel” rules

Rules with WHO empty (Anyone) or WHERE empty (Any channel) live under a synthetic group at the bottom of each grouped view. Their fallback dropdown is hidden — they already match every message that doesn’t get caught by a scoped group above.

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Slack identities

Below the rules, the Slack identities table lists every user and bot Annie can route on. Each row has a status pill:
  • Subscribed: Annie processes every message from this identity automatically, following any matching rule and the sender-fallback when nothing matches. This is the right setting for alerting bots (PagerDuty, Datadog, Grafana, Amazon Q).
  • Mention-only: Annie only processes messages from this identity when they tag @Annie. This is the default for human teammates so Annie doesn’t reply to every sentence.
Click the pill to flip it; the rules that target the identity stay in place. Use Add identity to register a Slack user or bot that hasn’t been seen yet — automation rules can target any identity, subscribed or not.

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Duplicate alert detection

A time window for suppressing repeated alerts. When enabled, Annie detects if the same alert was already processed recently and links to the existing investigation instead of starting a new one. Configurable per project from the same page.

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Examples

A common pattern for teams using Amazon Q to forward AWS Health Events to Slack:
  1. Subscribe Amazon Q from the Slack identities table.
  2. Switch the Rules pivot to Sender so Amazon Q has its own card.
  3. Add one rule inside the card: WHO=Amazon Q · WHAT=AWS Health Event with RDS · THEN=Reply with a short answer with instructions: “Validate whether the reported service had a real failure”.
  4. Leave the per-group fallback at Stay silent (the default for subscribed bots).
Annie validates RDS health events and stays silent on everything else from Amazon Q.
WHO=anyone · WHAT=Alert contains "RDS" or "database" or "postgres" · WHERE=any channel · THEN=Run InvestigationInvestigation instructions:
  • Check recent schema migrations in the last 24h
  • Review connection pool metrics and active connections
  • Look for long-running queries (>30s)
  • Check for recent deployments that might have changed queries
WHO=PagerDuty · WHAT=PagerDuty priority not P1 or P2 · THEN=Wait for human to trigger RCAAnnie posts a “Start investigation” button instead of investigating automatically. Team members click to investigate when they have time.
WHO=anyone · WHAT=Alert tags contain "test" · THEN=Stay silentAnnie ignores test alerts entirely.
For teams that have a single workflow bot forwarding multiple alert kinds:
  1. Subscribe the bot.
  2. Switch the Rules pivot to Sender.
  3. Inside the bot’s card, add focused rules ordered top-to-bottom (each with WHO=that bot).
  4. Set the card’s per-group fallback to Stay silent so anything that didn’t match falls quiet instead of triggering Annie’s default behavior.
This is the structural fix that prevents “I added a P1 rule but Annie keeps RCA-ing every message from this bot”.

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