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Inconsistent “thinking” status behavior - assistant.thread.setstatus #55

@ApsAd

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@ApsAd

I’m building a Slack Assistant app and using the new usermessage event structure. As per Slack’s guidelines, I listen a usermessage event and set "status": "thinking" to indicate the app is processing the user's message.

However, I’ve noticed that the “App is thinking...” spinner doesn’t consistently show up in the Slack client. Sometimes it works and other times there’s no visible indicator.

Here’s what I’m doing:

  1. In the userMessage event I'm immediately setting the status as "thinking"
  2. My business logic is a streaming http call to an LLM usually takes 10~15 seconds
  3. When the message is being processed I regularly update the status every 5 seconds "App is thinking", "App is searching..." etc.
  4. Despite this, the spinner often fails to appear in the Slack client, making the app seem unresponsive.

Has anyone else run into this?
Is there any guidance on how Slack decides whether to show the thinking spinner or how long it waits before timing out?

Any insight into this would be appreciated — especially workarounds or best practices to ensure a better UX.

Thanks!

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