Unfortunately most of the material on ChatOps currently covers only how to get Hubot to display cat pictures or other trivia [1]. Maybe it's because each company should create their own "chat API" but I'd also like to hear some real, inside "war stories".
Does anyone knows what app does GitHub use for chats? Looks like a simple and elegant UI over Basecamp.
I'm somewhat split. There's definite value in having a shared history of what people have done, but I prefer that to take the form of command line tools pushing status updates to Hipchat or whatever. You lose so much convineance by pretending Hipchat's chat box is a terminal, everything from command history to being able to quickly iterate over the contents of a file or set environment variables.
One of the most compelling aspects of it for me isn't so much the shared history, but just visibility of what people have done. It's a really effective way of transferring knowledge of how things are done. You can easily drop into the room and watch play-by-play how a given task is done.
Semi-off-topic, but I am genuinely scared by giving a chat bot full root access to your infrastructure. This just doesn't seem like a mature enough, AAA-enabled channel. Especially when there's a third party (HipChat/Slack/...) involved.
Has someone first hand experience with such Hubot usage? Do you prefer such commands or would you want to write more informal short sentences?