# Backwards-compatible refactoring of the Slack toolkit
Several performance improvements, streamlined tool set, and easier to
understand tool interfaces.
All "old" tools were kept for backwards compatibility, with the same
interfaces and response structure (but using the new and more performant
tools under the hood).
Full revision of unit-tests and evals.
## Streamlined tool set
Multiple groups of tools were streamlined into a single one:
* "get conversation metadata" from 5 tools to one;
* "send message" from 2 tools to one;
* "get users in conversation" from 3 tools to one;
* "get messages" from 4 tools to one
## New capabilities
* Messages retrieved are now populated with the users' names, apart from
ID: makes it easier for LLMs to reference who sent a message, were
mentioned, or reacted to a message
* Retrieve users by username, email, and/or ID (before we only supported
ID)
* Retrieve multiple users in a single tool call
## Concurrency controls
All operations issuing multiple requests concurrently now have a
`Semaphore` to limit the concurrency level. The limit can be controlled
through the `SLACK_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS` env var (defaults to 3).
## Networking performance improvement
Various operations that used to make multiple API calls are now executed
more efficiently:
### Find users by username
* Before: a full scan of `users_list` was required (potentially multiple
pages for large workspaces);
* Now it stops as soon as we have all users needed (yes, it was dumb
before)
### Get multiple users by their IDs
* Before: for each user ID, we made one API call to the `users_info`
endpoint
* Now: we call `list_users` and scan the results to match the user IDs
(an estimate of 99.5% of Slack workspaces have < 200 users; for large
workspaces, we may need to paginate `list_users`)
### Get a conversation by its users
* Before:
* Call to `list_conversations` (potentially paginating)
* For each conversation, one call to `conversations_members`
(potentially paginating)
* Then loop and find which conversation matches the users' IDs
* Now:
* A single call to `conversations_open`
### Overview
Major restructuring from monolithic `arcade-ai` package to modular
library architecture with standardized uv-based dependency management.
### New Package Structure
- **`arcade-tdk`** - Lightweight toolkit development kit (core
decorators, auth)
- **`arcade-core`** - Core execution engine and catalog functionality
- **`arcade-serve`** - FastAPI/MCP server components
- **`arcade-ai`** - Meta package that includes CLI functionality.
Optionally include evals via the `evals` extra. Optionally include all
packages via the `all` extra.
### Key Benefits
- **Lighter Dependencies**: Toolkits now depend only on `arcade-tdk` (~2
deps) vs full `arcade-ai` (~30+ deps)
- **Faster Builds**: uv provides 10-100x faster dependency resolution
and installation
- **Better Modularity**: Clear separation of concerns, consumers import
only what they need
- **Standard Tooling**: Eliminates custom poetry scripts, uses standard
Python packaging
### Migration Impact
- All 20 toolkits converted from poetry → uv with `arcade-tdk`
dependencies plus `arcade-ai[evals]` and `arcade-serve` dev
dependencies. When developing locally, devs should install toolkits via
`make install-local`.
- Modern Python 3.10+ type hints throughout
- Standardized build system with hatchling backend
- Enhanced Makefile with robust toolkit management commands
- Removed `arcade dev` CLI command
- Reduce the number of files created by `arcade new` and add an option
to not generate a tests and evals folder.
This foundation enables faster development cycles and cleaner dependency
chains for the growing toolkit ecosystem.
### Todo After this PR is merged
- [ ] Post-merge workflow(s) (release & publish containers, etc)
- [ ] Release order plan. @EricGustin suggests releasing in the
following order:
1. `arcade-core` version 0.1.0
2. `arcade-serve` version 0.1.0 and `arcade-tdk` version 0.1.0
3. `arcade-ai` version 2.0.0
4. Patch release for all toolkits (all changes in toolkits are internal
refactors)
- [ ] [Update docs](https://github.com/ArcadeAI/docs/pull/318)
---------
Co-authored-by: Eric Gustin <eric@arcade.dev>
Co-authored-by: Eric Gustin <34000337+EricGustin@users.noreply.github.com>
implements additional tools for Slack related to retrieving
conversations metadata, list of members, history of messages, as well as
sending messages to private/public channels and DMs / multi-person DMs.
---------
Co-authored-by: Eric Gustin <eric@arcade-ai.com>
Co-authored-by: Renato Byrro <rmbyrro@gmail.com>
