Slack Bot Infinite Loop Fix: Stop Your Bolt SDK Bot from Responding to Its Own Messages
If your Slack AI bot suddenly starts replying to itself in an endless chain of messages, you've hit one of the most common — and frustrating — pitfalls of building with the Bolt SDK. The root cause is almost always the same: your event listener doesn't distinguish between messages from real users and messages posted by the bot itself. This post walks you through exactly why this happens, how to detect and filter bot-generated messages, and how to build a production-safe message handler that never loops. Table of Contents Why Infinite Loops Happen in Slack Bots Anatomy of a Slack Message Event Filtering Bot Messages in Bolt SDK Advanced Guard Patterns for Production Testing Your Fix Locally with Socket Mode Full Working Example Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them 🔁 Why Infinite Loops Happen in Slack Bots When your bot posts a message to a Slack channel, Slack fires a message event — just like it does fo...