Inspiration
Slack marks you "away" after 10 minutes of no Slack-specific interaction.
I looked at existing solutions. Mouse jigglers simulate cursor movement but don't interact with Slack's activity detection. Chrome extensions work until your laptop sleeps or the tab gets suspended. All of them require your machine to be on. I wanted something that works at the right layer — Slack's own session protocol — and runs independently of any local device.
What it does
IdlePilot keeps your Slack presence active during configured work hours from the cloud. You connect once, set your schedule (per-day hours, timezone, lunch breaks), and your green dot stays on even if your laptop is closed. No desktop app, no browser extension, no workspace bot. It doesn't read or send messages — presence only.
How I built it
The core is a cloud worker that maintains a Slack web session by simulating browser-level WebSocket heartbeats during scheduled windows. Authentication uses the user's own Slack session token — no OAuth app install, no workspace-level permissions, no bot user.
Challenges I ran into
Slack's presence system is undocumented at the level I needed. And the server re-evaluates on every heartbeat cycle. I had to reverse-engineer how the web client maintains presence through WebSocket frames to replicate it server-side.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The entire product is zero-install from the user's perspective. No app, no extension running in the background, no workspace admin involved. You connect once and forget about it. That simplicity took real engineering to get right — every layer of complexity I removed from the user experience moved into the backend.
I also kept the scope brutally narrow. One feature.
Built With
- nextjs
- node.js
- postgresql
