New in v1.2.0 sharper detection engine · more reliable scans · read-only mode

Catch what slips through
ClickUp, Slack & Teams.

It's 9am Monday. Coffee in hand. Slack still loading. Pickle has already read your week. The 40-hour task with no description. The "shipping today" from 3 days ago. The decision in a group DM that never reached the card. Twenty-five patterns a sharp ops manager would catch across your tools by day three, Pickle catches in 5 seconds. Free & open source. It runs on your machine. No account, no server, no telemetry.

An ops manager costs $80k a year. Pickle is the free AI ops manager that runs on your own laptop.

Get Started · free See what it catches
No account. No key. No middleman sees your token Open source · MIT Founder-built · founder-supported
ClickUp · audited live Slack · audited live Microsoft Teams · audited live
Aditya Sharma A Built by Aditya Sharma · used daily by my own team and a handful of founder friends
// what pickle catches

Three workspaces. One audit.

A good ops manager catches this stuff by day three. Pickle does it before standup. Pick a platform tab and see three real catches Pickle would flag for you this morning.

ClickUp Pattern 01 · Empty hours
Pickle catch · ready in your morning brief
XYZ-184 has 47h logged this week. Comments: 0. Descriptions: "API improvements" × 4. Ask David in standup what shipped.
Slack Pattern 09 · DM-only completion
Pickle catch · ready in your morning brief
DM says "shipped the auth refactor" 6 days ago. Card XYZ-72 still In Progress, no comment since assignment. Either close it or call it WIP.
Microsoft Teams Pattern 12 · Decisions in DM
Pickle catch · ready in your morning brief
Decision made in #founders chat 6 days ago: "go with Stripe Checkout, not custom." Planner task XYZ-203 description still says TBD. Update before the team rebuilds context.
// 25 patterns · 7 families · all free

The work that quietly falls through.

Twenty-five failure modes a sharp ops manager catches, grouped into 7 families. Most need nothing but ClickUp. The four cross-tool ones read chat, so they switch on once you connect a Slack or Teams token. Every one is free — there's no paid tier. All 25 are below.

01 · stale ask
reply owed
Someone asked, you never replied

A direct request landed in a comment or DM and it's aging with no answer from you. Not a decision, not a doc — just a reply someone is still waiting on.

Real catch
"Can you send the Q3 numbers when you get a sec?" — Maya asked Monday. No reply from you since. Three days old now.
02 · unanswered question
still open
A question pointed at you, still open

A plain question aimed at you — in a thread, a reply, or after your @mention — with no answer from you after it. Easy to scroll past, easy to forget you owe a one-line reply.

Real catch
"Which video did you mean — the MCP one?" Asked in #content 2 days ago. Still no reply from you in the thread.
03 · approval pending
you're the gate
Waiting on your yes or no

A draft, quote, spend, or PR is parked on your sign-off. Someone can't publish or proceed until you say go. Pickle surfaces the exact item and how long it's waited.

Real catch
"Draft's ready — good to publish?" Sent Tuesday. It's Friday, no answer, the post is still sitting in the queue.
04 · decision pending
a real call
A real decision, not a quick reply

An open call with a tradeoff and consequences — ship-or-hold, this-vendor-or-that — parked on you. Higher stakes than a question, and it's been sitting.

Real catch
"Do we ship Friday or hold for the fix?" Asked Wednesday. No call made yet. Friday is tomorrow.
05 · blocked waiting on you
someone's idle
Someone stalled, waiting on you

Another person's work has stopped specifically because they need something only you can give — an approval, an answer, an unblock. They're idle until you move.

Real catch
"I'm blocked until you approve the API scope." Posted 2 days ago. Their branch hasn't moved since.
06 · fyi needs action
the trap
An "FYI" that's actually a task

Most "heads up" messages are noise, and Pickle skips them. A few hide a consequence you own — a deadline, a churn signal, a change to something you maintain. Only those get flagged.

Real catch
"Heads up — the client said they'll churn if the report's late again." Framed as an FYI. It's a deadline you own.
07 · delegation stalled
handed off, dropped
You handed it off. Nothing came back.

You asked someone to do a specific thing and there's no delivery — no file, no link, no status change. Pickle checks every surface (comments, threads, DMs) before flagging, so it's never a false "you never did this."

Real catch
"Karan, can you finish the onboarding doc this week?" Asked Monday. It's Friday — no doc, no link, no update.
08 · expired promise
trust erosion
"Shipping by Friday," said Monday

Soft commitments in chat die in scrollback. Pickle reads ClickUp comments and chat, anchors the dated promise, and flags it by Friday EOD with the exact quote.

Real catch
Mon 10:42am: "Will land the migration by Friday." Friday 6pm: still open, no comment in 48h.
09 · acknowledged, not delivered
"on it" isn't done
"On it!" — then nothing

An acknowledgement is not a deliverable. "Sure, working on it" with no file, link, or status change days later is a stall dressed up as progress. Pickle tells the two apart.

Real catch
Asked for the pricing deck Tuesday. Reply: "on it!" It's Friday — no deck, no follow-up, task still open.
10 · your open loop
you owe you
You said "I'll do it" — and didn't

The loop you opened yourself. "I'll review it tonight," "let me check" — then it fell off. Pickle reads your own outbound messages and flags the ones you never closed.

Real catch
"I'll review the PR tonight." Said Monday. Three days on, the PR is still unreviewed and nobody chased you.
11 · empty hours
budget leak
Time logged, nothing shipped

Hours pile up on a task; the description is blank or "8h development." The dashboard says someone's working; nothing in the task says what they built. Pickle cites the hours, the comment count, and the window.

Real catch · Tuesday
XYZ-184 has 47h logged this week. Comments: 0. Description: 'API improvements'. What are we paying for?
12 · stale in-progress
silent killer
"In progress" for six weeks

Not blocked, not done — just sitting. The kind of task you find in your monthly review and realise it's been drifting sideways since March. Flagged the same week, week after week, if it keeps rotting.

Real catch
XYZ-87: In Progress · 43 days. Last comment: 19 days ago. Pickle flagged it Wednesday before standup.
13 · zombie task
never opened
Assigned. Never touched.

30+ days since assignment, never opened, never mentioned in any chat. Lives in the list like a forgotten password, and counts in every report as "pending."

Real catch
Sarah has 4 tasks from March. Two shipped. Two haven't been opened since assignment. Ask her about XYZ-45 and XYZ-67.
14 · standup copy-paste
fake updates
Same standup three days running

When today's standup is >85% identical to yesterday's, it isn't an update — it's a placeholder. Pickle catches the repetition and marks those days zero-evidence.

Real catch
Mon/Tue/Wed standups from David: identical text, two pixels different. The week shows no actual progress.
15 · blocker age
auto-escalate
Blocker raised, nobody cleared it

Blocked for a day is fine. Two weeks is a process failure. Pickle stamps days-unresolved on every blocker, turns it red at 14 days, and asks who owns the unblock.

Real catch
XYZ-91 has been "Blocked: waiting on legal" for 17 days. Pickle: who's your contact at legal? Loop them in.
16 · weak description
signal not effort
"8h development" is not a description

Time billed isn't the same as time accounted for. Pickle scores the description: does it say what shipped, or just how long it took?

Real catch
Last week: 6 time entries totalling 31h. Four say "development" or "fixes." Two say what changed and why.
17 · leaked secret
urgent
A key pasted in plain text

An API key, token, or password dropped into a comment or chat is a live exposure. Pickle spots the shape of a real credential, redacts it in its own output, and flags it to rotate — top priority, every run.

Real catch
A comment reads "here's the key: sk-proj-…VugA." Still visible in the thread. Rotate it, then delete the message.
18 · access request
grant / revoke
Access to grant — or revoke

Someone's asking to be added, given admin, or handed a seat — or someone flagged access that should be pulled. Both are easy to say "later" to and forget. Revoking a departing person's access is the urgent half.

Real catch
"Can you give me access to the analytics dashboard?" Asked 4 days ago. Still no grant, still blocked.
19 · orphaned work
losing its owner
Work about to lose its owner

Someone's leaving and their open tasks, ownership, and context are about to become nobody's. Pickle pairs the "last day" signal with their open list so nothing quietly goes unowned.

Real catch
"Friday's my last day." Chris still owns the deploy pipeline and 3 open tasks. No handover recorded yet.
20 · refund pending
money owed
A refund or payout still hanging

A refund, invoice, or payout that's owed and unresolved — with a customer likely chasing it. Money plus a waiting customer floors this to high; past a week overdue, it's urgent.

Real catch
"Refund on ticket #21580 still not showing after 17 days." Customer has chased twice. Nothing processed.
21 · escalation / complaint
churn signal
A client quietly signalling churn

A ticket escalated to you, or a frustrated client hinting they're reconsidering. "Third time this is late" isn't a grumble — it's a retention risk. Pickle floors these to high so they don't sink in the queue.

Real catch
"Third time the report's late — we're reconsidering the contract." Sent 2 days ago. No owner-level reply yet.
22 · ghost mode
Needs chat
Silent across every surface

Comments: 0. Chat messages: 0. Task updates: 0 — for 40%+ of the window. Pickle flags the gap and checks whether they were DM-active, so you can tell burnout from just-async. Needs a Slack or Teams token connected.

Real catch
Chris: silent in #engineering for 11 of the last 14 days. DM activity: yes. Not absent, just disengaged from team channels.
23 · DM-only completion
Needs chat
"Done" in DM. Card never updated.

Completion claimed in chat while the card still says In Progress. Two weeks later the dashboard says you're behind. Pickle gives partial credit and a hygiene flag. Needs a Slack or Teams token connected.

Real catch
David DMed: "shipped the auth refactor." Card XYZ-72 still In Progress, no comment. Close it or call it WIP.
24 · manager bottleneck
Needs chat
Tasks awaiting you

The hardest pattern to see in yourself. Pickle inverts the audit and counts every task or comment your team is waiting on you for — the days your review blocks their work. Needs a Slack or Teams token connected.

Real catch
3 tasks waiting on your review · 7 comments tagged @you with no reply · 1 "approval please" from 9 days ago.
25 · decision in DM
Needs chat
Decision made in chat, never on the card

Group DMs are where decisions actually happen; cards are where they're supposed to land. Pickle scans group DMs, matches mentions of task IDs, and links the decision back. Needs a Slack or Teams token connected.

Real catch
"Let's go with Stripe Checkout, not custom" — decided in #founders DM 6 days ago. Card XYZ-203 still says "TBD."
// what already lives in your stack

Three native tools. None of them audit.

ClickUp Brain, Slack AI, and Microsoft Copilot each summarise what's already in their own app. None compare what your team said in chat against what the tasks actually show. That cross-tool audit is the entire point of Pickle. Click whichever applies to you:

Inside ClickUp

Pickle vs ClickUp Brain

CapabilityBrainPickle
Summarise a task✓✓
Generate task descriptions✓✗
Ranked inbox across all your tasks✗✓
Empty-description time entries✗✓
Zombie task detection✗✓
Standup-vs-evidence audit✗✓
Expired-promise tracking✗✓
Blocker age + escalation✗✓
Matches chat decisions to the task card✗✓
Runs inside Claude / Cursor / Codex / Cline✗✓
Brain writes for you. Pickle audits what's there.
Inside Slack

Pickle vs Slack AI

CapabilitySlack AIPickle
Summarise a thread / channel✓✓
Daily channel recap✓✓
Unanswered DMs as actionable inbox✗✓
@mentions you never replied to✗✓
What YOU delegated, never heard back✗✓
Drafts follow-ups · waits for approval✗✓
Refuses 3rd nudge to the same person✗✓
Scores messages by your role✗✓
Links a DM decision back to the task card✗✓
Runs in your assistant (not stuck in Slack)✗✓
Slack AI summarises. Pickle follows up.
Inside Teams

Pickle vs Microsoft Copilot

CapabilityCopilotPickle
Summarise a meeting✓✓
Draft replies in Teams✓✗
Reads Planner tasks assigned to you✓✓
Unanswered 1:1 + group chats as inbox✗✓
Approvals + adaptive cards as items✓✓
Delegated Planner tasks tracker✗✓
Action items from meeting chats✓✓
Cross-platform: chat ↔ task evidence✗✓
Runs in any MCP host (not just Teams)✗✓
Copilot writes inside a meeting. Pickle audits the day after.

The TL;DR. Native AIs are great inside their tool. Pickle is what reads across all three and tells you what no single one of them can see.

// one command

One command. Guided. It walks you through the rest.

The installer asks which tools you use and walks you through getting each token. Nothing to hand-edit, no account, no key from us. Free and open on npm.

TERMINAL
$ curl -fsSL https://pickle.adityaarsharma.com/install.sh | bash
Pick your tools (ClickUp / Slack / Teams). It points you to where each token lives (e.g. a ClickUp pk_… from Settings → Apps), you paste it, and it writes your MCP config for you. Restart your client and ask Pickle to audit.
Works in Claude Code · Claude Desktop · Cursor · Codex · Cline · Zed · any MCP host. Prefer manual setup? Manual install.
What the installer writes

It adds Pickle to your MCP config with your own platform token in env, nothing from us:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pickle": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/pickle/server-remote/server.mjs"],
      "env": { "CLICKUP_API_KEY": "pk_your_own_token" }
    }
  }
}

Restart your client, then ask: "Pickle, audit my ClickUp from the last 7 days."

// privacy

There's no server to trust. That's the whole design.

Every other AI workspace tool asks you to ship your data to their cloud and trust their retention policy. Pickle never asks, because there is nowhere to send it. It runs on your machine, with your token, and talks only to the tools you point it at.

No middleman ever sees your token

It lives in your own MCP config file (chmod 600) and is used to call ClickUp / Slack / Microsoft Graph directly from your computer. No Pickle service sits in the middle, so there is nothing for anyone to store, log, or leak.

No account. No telemetry.

No signup, no key to issue, no analytics, no phone-home. Pickle does not know you exist, and cannot. By construction, not by policy.

Your work data stays where it already lives

Pickle reads your ClickUp / Slack / Teams. That is the job. But it reads them directly, from your machine, with your own credentials. Nothing is copied anywhere new.

Don't take my word for it

The whole thing is MIT on GitHub. Read the server before you run it and grep it for a single outbound call you did not authorise. That is a stronger guarantee than any privacy policy I could write.

// why this exists

I built this because I needed it.

Aditya Sharma A
Aditya Sharma
Founder · shipping Pickle from adityaarsharma.com

I've been running small teams for years. Every Monday I'd open ClickUp and find a task with 47 hours logged and "API improvements" as the description, repeated four times. Every Friday someone's "shipping today" from three days ago was still open. Every review I'd find a task that had been "in progress" since April.

Hiring another ops person was the obvious answer. $80k a year for someone to do the unglamorous part of management. That seemed dumb. So I built the AI ops manager I wished I had. Runs every morning. Reads all three workspaces. Tells me what's slipping.

Pickle is not a vibe-coded AI demo. I'm shipping it with the same care I put into every product on adityaarsharma.com. I dogfood it on my own team every morning. I keep my products alive. They don't disappear after a launch tweet.

Native AIs (ClickUp Brain, Slack AI, Copilot) are great inside their own tool. None of them read across the other two. Pickle is the only thing built specifically to audit work across all three workspaces and catch what falls between them. That's the category. That's the gap.

My honest deal with you: Use Pickle for 7 days. If it doesn't catch one thing you'd actually want to fix, delete the config block and email me what was missing. I read every one. Free & open source, free if it doesn't work for you, free if you just want to read the source. There's no catch.

"

The first morning I ran it, Pickle caught a task with 47 hours logged and 'API improvements' as the description, repeated four times. We'd been paying for that for a month.

Me, the first time I dogfooded it

Used it for two weeks. Found two zombie tasks they'd completely forgotten about, and a decision in a group DM that never reached the card. Now it gets checked before standup.

Paraphrased from a founder friend running it on their own team
// stay sharp

Using AI at work, without the hype.

Every couple of weeks on Substack: one practical note on getting AI actually working inside a real team: the workflows that stick, the ones that don't, and what I learn building free tools like Pickle.

Get it in your inbox

Opens Substack to confirm. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.

Is your team struggling to actually use the AI you pay for? The newsletter gives you the tips for free. But if you’re a business or agency that wants hands-on help (onboarding a team, wiring AI into how the work actually gets done, getting past the pilot that goes nowhere), let’s get on a call.

Book a 30-min AI-adoption call →
// frequently asked

Real questions. Straight answers.

If you're going to add an MCP server to your workspace, you deserve to know exactly what it does and doesn't do.

Does Pickle actually work across ClickUp, Slack, AND Microsoft Teams?

Yes. 25 patterns across 7 families. Most run on ClickUp alone (stale tasks, zombie tasks, expired promises, aging blockers, padded time, weak descriptions, and more). Connect a Slack or Teams token and the cross-tool patterns switch on too — the ones that compare what was said in chat against what the card shows (ghost mode, DM-only completion, decisions-in-DM, manager bottleneck). One token per platform, all local, and Pickle delivers a single brief through Claude / Cursor / Codex / Cline.

Won't my team resent being audited like this?

Pickle is a private brief, not a public scoreboard. The output goes to you, the manager or founder, inside your own assistant. It's not posted in a channel. It's not stack-ranked. It's not surfaced to anyone you didn't already pay to know this stuff. Think of it as the thing a good ops manager would tell you over coffee Monday morning, except automated. Most of what Pickle catches is just "hey, this card is rotting, somebody should poke it". That's a healthier signal than nothing. The patterns are about work, not people: stale tasks, broken promises, empty descriptions. Not "Sarah is slow." Use it the way you'd use it if you were managing the team yourself, because you are.

Is my ClickUp / Slack / Teams token safe?

Yes. There is no middleman. Your token sits in your own local MCP config file (chmod 600) and is used to call ClickUp / Slack / Microsoft Graph directly from your computer. It goes to those vendors and nowhere else. There is no Pickle server in the path, so there is nothing for us to store, log, or leak. No account, no telemetry. The source is on GitHub. Read it before you run it.

Do I have to install anything? Run Node? Use the terminal?

A little. Pickle runs locally, so you need Node 20+. It is one command: curl -fsSL https://pickle.adityaarsharma.com/install.sh | bash (or add npx pickle-mcp to your MCP client config). The installer asks which tools you use, points you to where each token lives, and writes your MCP config without touching any other server. Restart your client and ask it to audit.

How do I add my ClickUp / Slack / Teams tokens?

The installer asks you. Grab a ClickUp personal token (Settings → Apps, starts with pk_), and optionally a Slack or Teams token, then paste them when ./install.sh prompts. They are written into the env block of your local MCP config and never sent anywhere except the platform they belong to. Add more later by re-running the installer or editing the config yourself.

Which assistants does Pickle plug into?

Any assistant that speaks MCP. Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex (OpenAI Agent SDK), Cline, Continue, Zed, Goose. Install configs for the four most-used are above the FAQ.

How is this different from ClickUp Brain, Slack AI, or Microsoft Copilot?

Native AIs are great inside their own tool. Brain summarises ClickUp; Slack AI summarises Slack; Copilot drafts replies in Teams. None of them audit, and none read across the other two. Pickle is built to find the 40-hour task with no description, the "shipping today" promise still open Thursday, the decision in #founders DM that never reached the Planner card. That cross-tool synthesis is what we do. (Full comparison tables are in the section above.)

Does any of this run on your servers?

Self-hosting is the product now. There is no cloud. You run Pickle on your own machine under MIT, with your own tokens. Each teammate installs their own copy (one command). New versions come from npm automatically via npx. That is the whole trade: you own it end to end, and nobody else ever holds your data.

What patterns does Pickle catch today?

25 patterns in 7 families: reply-owed (questions, approvals, decisions waiting on you), commitment-owed (delegations + promises that stalled), your own open loops, risk & security (leaked keys, access, departing-owner work), money & customers (refunds, escalations, churn), board hygiene (stale / zombie / padded tasks), and cross-tool gaps that need a Slack/Teams token (ghost mode, DM-only completion, manager bottleneck, decisions in DM). All free, all included. Each is a concrete rule, not vibes. Full descriptions in the patterns section above; git pull for new ones.

What happens if you (the founder) shut Pickle down?

Nothing breaks. Pickle runs on your machine, not mine. There is no service to shut down. Your copy keeps working exactly as it does today, and the source is MIT on GitHub, so anyone can fork and keep improving it. That is precisely why it is local and open.

Who built this and why should I trust them?

One person: Aditya Sharma. I keep my products alive. They don't disappear after a launch tweet. Founder-built, founder-supported. If anything breaks, email me at [email protected]. I respond direct.