ChatOps: you say some trigger, and you get some response. The processing behind the scenes can be as complex or niche as you like.

In this blog, we’ll talk about three different ChatOps tools (Slack, GitHub Actions, Hubot) and how they can:

• Set up a basic reminder (Slack)
• Trigger image builds, performance tests, etc. on PRs (GitHub Actions)
• Send a list of open PRs, and their review counts, to Slack (Hubot)

Slack

Slack has a few baked in commands (“Shortcuts”). The most useful I’ve seen is reminders - whether for yourself or for your team. Here’s a few examples, with the format /remind [yourself or #channel] [what] [when]:

• /remind #my-team to join Google Meet on Wednesday at 4:30pm
• /remind me to file TPS reports in 20 minutes
• /remind me to have a great weekend every Friday at 5pm

GitHub Actions

Note: If you have a project on Public GitHub, you can use their action runners for free. If you’re in the GitHub Enterprise Suite, you’ll need to deploy your own runs-on: [self-hosted] runners. There are some projects that can help you kick-start self-hosting, such as the scalable spot instance setup terraform-aws-github-runner.

When we counted the number of clicks to create a build and performance test a branch, it was about 40. With this, it was less than 10.

It is super valuable to performance test before merging. ChatOps provides a really low barrier to entry: just ask a PR to be performance tested via a comment trigger, and an hour later you have:

1. Docker images built
2. Applications performance tested

2026 edit: And now we have PR chatbots like Greptile that do reviews… still, firing custom commands on messages is pretty cool: high-level, simple declarative language.

Hubot

Hubot is great for integrations like posting summaries of open PRs, review counts, and notifications into team Slack channels so you keep review cycles tight without noisy email alerts.