chat-search

chat-search

Locate one or more messages across the configured messenger (Slack today, additional providers as they come online) by keyword, optional chat scope, and optional time window. The skill returns a ranked list of hits — it does not condense a long conversation into a narrative; for that, use chat-summary.

When to use

• The user asks "find the slack message where Alice mentioned the rollback", "search messenger for 'feature flag cutover'", or similar.
• Another skill (e.g. solve-issue) needs to cite the originating chat discussion before acting on a ticket.
• The user remembers a phrase but not the channel or the author.

Procedure

1. Resolve a chat scope (only if the user named one)

If the user said something like "in #eng" or "in the deploys channel", resolve the humanised name to a chat_id first. Searching without a scope is also fine — it's just slower and noisier.

# Narrow by name — pick the best match from the returned list
devboy tools call get_messenger_chats '{"search": "eng", "limit": 10}'

Useful filters: chat_type (direct / group / channel), include_inactive (archived chats are hidden by default). Note: cursor-based pagination is accepted by the tool's argument schema today but the response is formatted as text and does not surface a next_cursor back to the caller — narrow the hit list with search / limit instead, or refine the query.

2. Run the search

search_chat_messages takes a free-text query and optional chat_id, plus a provider-timestamp since / until window when the user cares about recency:

# Global search
devboy tools call search_chat_messages '{"query": "rollback", "limit": 30}'

# Scoped to one chat
devboy tools call search_chat_messages '{
  "query": "feature flag cutover",
  "chat_id": "C0123456789",
  "limit": 50
}'

# Last week, any chat
devboy tools call search_chat_messages '{
  "query": "incident",
  "since": "1712448000.000000",
  "until": "1713052800.000000"
}'

since / until are provider-native timestamps (Slack passes them straight through — floating-point epoch seconds, as strings). If the user phrases a window in natural language ("yesterday", "last week"), convert to epoch seconds before calling.

3. Narrow a too-large result set

search_chat_messages returns at most limit hits per call (capped at 1000). The response is rendered as formatted text and does not surface a next_cursor back to the caller today, so cursor-based pagination is not actionable from the tool output. Instead of trying to page, narrow the query:

• Tighten since / until to a smaller window.
• Add distinguishing words to query.
• Scope with chat_id to the channel the user actually meant.
• Raise limit as a last resort, but the hit list gets harder to skim fast.

If cursor pagination becomes genuinely necessary for a user's workflow, that requires a tool-side change to expose the pagination metadata, not a skill-side workaround.

4. Rank and present

Before handing the hits back to the user:

• Sort by recency. Messengers default to relevance; users almost always want "the most recent mention" first. Override the order client-side.
• One line per hit. Channel (or DM partner) + author + date + a one-line excerpt (≤ 120 chars, collapse newlines).
• Deduplicate threads. If multiple hits belong to the same thread, show the root hit once with a count of matching replies.
• Cite coordinates, not permalinks. The unified MessengerMessage type does not include a permalink field, so do not promise jump-to-message URLs. Surface the chat_id + message id / timestamp instead — that's enough for the user to open the message directly in Slack (slack://channel?team=…&id=<chat_id>&message=<ts>) or paste into a helper script.

Example render:

#eng        alice   2026-04-15 14:02   "…rolling back v2.4.1, see incident-204…"  (C0123/ts=1712584920.010)
DM bob      bob     2026-04-14 09:31   "feature flag cutover is done on staging"

Success criteria

• The hits all contain the query term (the provider did real matching, not a partial / fuzzy miss the skill silently tolerated).
• The list is ordered newest-first and limited to what the user asked for — no dumping 500 rows when the user said "find the message".
• Channel, author, and date are present for every hit; excerpts are truncated, not walls of text.

Guardrails

• Messenger content is often confidential. Do not forward raw message bodies to external systems (trackers, PR descriptions, documentation) without the user explicitly asking for that forwarding.
• If the configured Slack token lacks the read scopes (channels:history, groups:history, im:history, mpim:history), search results will be incomplete or empty. When hits look suspiciously thin, run devboy test slack and check the "Missing scopes" line.

Non-goals

• This skill does not summarise a long channel or catch the user up on a day — use chat-summary for that.
• It does not send or forward anything — use notify when the user wants to post.