Simplicity of IRC
IRC is antiquated in most of the ways that matter, but there&#x27;s one thing it has that I continue to miss in every other chat platform I&#x27;ve had to use: painless automation.<p>I spend a lot of time in Slack for work, and maybe half of that time is manually connecting pieces of data (who should I ping for a review on X? what&#x27;s Y&#x27;s email address or other contact information?) that I could trivially script with an IRC bot that listens for prefixed commands. I know I <i>can</i> do that with Slack Apps (or whatever else), but just looking at them gives me anxiety: there&#x27;s tokens, and webhooks, and all kinds of ambiguously permanent or ephemeral state that&#x27;s going to eventually break or expire. IRC bots, by contrast, have virtually no cognitive overhead: the only moving parts are the socket, and <i>maybe</i> a username and password for server authentication.<p>Ultimately, the tradeoffs are probably the right ones. But whenever I find myself chatting on IRC outside of work, I can&#x27;t help but think of what <i>would</i> be possible if our &quot;serious&quot; chat services were just a little more hackable.