Kilo Code, the open-source AI coding startup backed by GitLab cofounder Sid Sijbrandij, is launching a Slack integration that allows software engineering teams to execute code changes, debug issues, and push pull requests directly from their team chat — without opening an IDE or switching applications.The product, called Kilo for Slack, arrives as the AI-assisted coding market heats up with multibillion-dollar acquisitions and funding rounds. But rather than building another siloed coding assistant, Kilo is making a calculated bet: that the future of AI development tools lies not in locking engineers into a single interface, but in embedding AI capabilities into the fragmented workflows where decisions actually happen.”Engineering teams don’t make decisions in IDE sidebars. They make them in Slack,” Scott Breitenother, Kilo Code’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with VentureBeat. “The Slackbot allows you to do all this — and more — without leaving Slack.”The launch also marks a partnership with MiniMax, the Hong Kong-based AI company that recently completed a successful initial public offering. MiniMax’s M2.1 model will serve as the default model powering Kilo for Slack — a decision the company frames as a statement about the closing gap between open-weight and proprietary frontier models.How Kilo for Slack turns team conversations into pull requests without leaving the chatThe integration operates on a simple premise: Slack threads often contain the context needed to fix a bug or implement a feature, but that context gets lost the moment a developer switches to their code editor.With Kilo for Slack, users mention @Kilo in a Slack thread, and the bot reads the entire conversation, accesses connected GitHub repositories, and either answers questions about the codebase or creates a branch and submits a pull request.A typical interaction might look like this: A pro …
