SlackWhat they did
In late August Mac set up a CFO agent in Grok Bot with read-only access to his personal checking and savings accounts. Its brief was what a personal financial adviser would tell him each month: balances, the month's expenses, recurring charges, anything that looked fraudulent, and ways to save. It was told to message only him, inside a Grok Bot group chat of his agents he called his personal exec team. A separate agent of his was connected to his company's Slack. He had already been using personal agents for chores such as chasing the DMV, collecting quotes for house work and booking golf.
How it went
Weekly runs were fine. On 1 October the first monthly audit was posted to a Slack channel named Exec-team, XMTP's real executive channel. His head of product assumed it was company financials until it mentioned the barn Mac was building at home; it included his savings balance, biggest expenses and that he was over his spending target. Grok's team traced it to all of his agents sharing the same underlying connections, with two destinations of the same name, and shipped a change requiring explicit permission before an agent moves information between channels. Mac then disconnected everything: Google, calendars, banking and Stripe.
Worth knowing
In Grok Bot a connection you add for one agent is available to all of them, and channel names collide between personal and work. HN commenters were harsh about mixing personal finance data with a work Slack at all; one described a safer pattern where the agent sees transactions through an intermediary program and can only report to its owner. The account is a Business Insider as-told-to piece, so it is Mac's own telling.
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