Slack workflows as duct tape

A workflow we've wanted for a long time at Buttondown: throw a random paper cut or complaint into a Slack channel, and get a nicely formatted Linear issue out the other end. This is not a novel desire. Linear offers it out of the box via Linear Asks — on the enterprise plan. I am a cheapskate, and I could not justify a couple hundred extra dollars a month for this one thing. So I set out to jerry-rig it myself. The answer is honestly kind of funny, and kind of sad. Behold: The Slack workflow: when a message posted in #sadness contains "sadness", reply in thread asking @Linear to check for an existing issue, and otherwise file it and assign the sender. And it works! Ideally this is the sort of thing Slack's workflow builder does natively, and my bar was low: I needed neither polish nor perfection but simple mechanical routing. The blocker is in identity mapping, as far as I can tell: the Slack–Linear integration has no canonical way to map a given Slack user to a given Linear user, and…