Anthropic's Claude tag puts an agent in your Slack with no setup. A self-hosted Agent SDK deployment takes real work. This post helps you decide which one is the right fit for you
The complete setup for a Slack-based AI agent on your own EC2 instance - the request path, the Agent SDK configuration, tools, sub-agents, channel routing etc.
How to set up an agent that handles image edits, background removal, upscaling, and kiosk video assets from a Slack message - including the specific models we use for each job
How to build a custom AI agent workflow to publish on a regular cadence
How to build a debugging agent your whole team can rely on, on every shift: it answers from curated error patterns first, falls back to your docs and read-only source, and keeps the troubleshooting docs current on its own.
An overview of the routine operational work we handed to AI agents at XPR, safeguards added and lessons learned