I built a ~300-line Python bridge so I can chat with Rovo Dev directly from Slack – no terminal, no context switching, just AI-assisted coding wherever I already am.

The Setup: From Terminal to Slack

I spend a lot of time in Slack. My terminal? Less so. So I asked myself – what if I could talk to Rovo Dev (Atlassian’s AI coding agent) directly from Slack? No switching context, no opening a terminal, no acli rovodev run --yolo every time.

Turns out – it’s totally doable. Here’s how I built it over a weekend.

The Big Picture

Why This is Cool

• ✅ No terminal needed – chat with your AI coding agent from Slack
• ✅ Socket Mode – no public URL, no ngrok, no firewall rules
• ✅ Private – only my messages are processed, everyone else is silently ignored
• ✅ Auto-starts on boot – runs as a systemd service, always available
• ✅ Full Rovo Dev power – it can read files, run bash, query Jira, search Confluence

How It Works – Step by Step

The Stack

Component	Technology	Purpose
AI Agent	acli rovodev serve	HTTP API mode of Rovo Dev CLI
Slack Integration	Slack Bolt (Python) + Socket Mode	Receive & send Slack messages
Bridge	Python 3 (~300 lines)	Glues Slack ↔ Rovo Dev together
Process Manager	systemd	Auto-start on boot, auto-restart on crash

Key Discovery: acli rovodev serve

The magic ingredient is acli rovodev serve PORT – a little-known mode of the Rovo Dev CLI that spins up a local HTTP server with a clean API:

acli rovodev serve 18888 --disable-session-token

This exposes two key endpoints:

• POST /v3/set_chat_message – send a message to the AI
• GET /v3/stream_chat – receive the response as a Server-Sent Events (SSE) stream

The bridge POSTs your Slack message, then reads the SSE stream and collects the full response before posting it back to Slack.

Security: Only My Messages

Anyone can DM the bot or @mention it – but only messages from my Slack user ID are processed. Everyone else gets silently ignored. One line of code:

ALLOWED_USER_ID = os.environ.get("ALLOWED_USER_ID", "")
def is_allowed(event) -> bool:
    if not ALLOWED_USER_ID:
        return True  # no restriction set
    return event.get("user") == ALLOWED_USER_ID

What’s Next

• 🔜 Streaming replies – post partial responses as Rovo Dev types (like ChatGPT)
• 🔜 Multi-session support – different Slack threads = different Rovo Dev sessions
• 🔜 Slash commands – /rv plan, /rv ask, /rv review
• 🔜 File uploads – attach a file in Slack, Rovo Dev reads it

TL;DR