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Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background (https://github.com)

60 points by jd_ 5 days ago | 37 comments | View on ycombinator

BSOhealth about 12 hours ago |

I added a quick setup option for Pizza Bot + AudioReality, so you can have your Pizza Bot inbox turned into a quick audio update via podcast feed: https://www.audioreality.ai/docs/agents/pizza-bot

boplicity 4 days ago |

This looks great. I've been playing around with GrokBot, and like a lot of what it does, but would much, much prefer an open source project to manage various asynchronous tasks.

What I like about GrokBot is the combination of freeform agent discussions, scheduled jobs, agent-to-agent communication, per-agent memory, and the fact that they all get a sandboxed instance with a browser. It's very well implemented. I think they have a very similar vision to yours.

nucleardog 4 days ago |

Got it installed, been playing with it for a bit.

Had a bit of jankiness during setup as I fought with llama.cpp bugs. There are a few issues around models reported by the provider changing, refreshing as they change, had a few instances of "New Chat" showing one model then hitting llama.cpp with another, etc. Sorry, been traveling for a bit and didn't have the energy to properly recreate and put together a real bug report. Just a heads up that the onboarding there is a bit rough, though anyone running their own local models is probably more than able to get it figured out.

I'm really liking it. I wish I had something more substantial to say than "it's easy and clean" but... it's easy and clean. And as far as "AI tooling" goes, the setup was an absolute breeze even with the issues. The fact that I can just install a single app and go rather than spending hours and hours on setup, configuration, etc makes me way more likely to use this going forward... it's a lot easier to rely on a tool when I know it will be quick to fix if it breaks.

One note and one feature request, if you want 'em:

Though now that I understand the concepts better it's obvious, it _wasn't_ immediately obvious why the MCP server I added wasn't working. Tools are called via "tasks", and "tasks" are defined based on the skills. I had to create a skill. I'm sure it's somewhere in the documentation but I (and most people) don't read that kind of stuff, so would be good to surface somewhere obvious in the UI maybe?

And I would absolutely _love_ if you could override the provider and model per task. I run a small model locally as it's good enough for most of what I want to do (and cheap! and private!), but it would be great if I could define a "write-code" skill that was run via Claude instead or something so I could delegate tasks that aren't really suitable for a tiny local model out to something more capable.

Anyway... Cool tool. Hope to see it continue to grow and evolve! Thank you for releasing this!

esafak 4 days ago |

I have a more basic question; I am trying to understand its purpose.

How does this compare with connecting your agent to your ticket tracker? Linear can dispatch the agents: https://linear.app/agents https://linear.app/docs/coding-sessions

If it is about local work, how does it compare with simply having your agent monitor a directory for ticket files?

jd_ 4 days ago |

Author here - thanks so much for the great questions! Our post on the AWS Open Source blog has more screenshots and an architecture diagram if you want to give it a skim: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/introducing-pizza-bo...

digi59404 4 days ago |

Was watching a video from GitLab, posted 7 months ago about something similar.

You might find it interesting. https://youtu.be/TRpQW-TFTfw

nzjrs 4 days ago |

Why bother depending on DeepAgents and LangChain etc. My professional impression is such Middleware no longer brings anything if you primarily maintain the codebase with coding tools.

scottydelta 4 days ago |

Why does it have to be a desktop app vs a self hostable web app?

That way it can truly run asynchronously, even with the computer switched off.

weee322 4 days ago |

Ideal for https://github.com/giannisanni/pulsar/ or kimi 3 on CPU

probably 30s for one token is too long for normal people but for agents it is ok

sgc 4 days ago |

Do you have a list of a few mcp servers or other tools you would add to help with the pizza-bot specific workflow? For example, how would you enforce structured output, should that be an mcp server, a plugin, already in the box?

taylorhou 4 days ago |

congrats on the public launch! it's been clear to me for a while now that agents will need their own ways to communicate and an asynchronous inbox/task system is a necessity already. will point my agents at the repo to see how we can leverage

zdyn5 4 days ago |

Nice work! Can you comment on how this differentiates from Paperclip?

aaronax 4 days ago |

Why not use real email?

je42 4 days ago |

How would you compare PizzaBot to Herdr?

htrp 4 days ago |

why not an actual inbox? set up a gmail and have the agent email you?

aadyachinubhai 4 days ago |

cool idea, how helpful is this in practice?

thiagoc77 4 days ago |

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camilaferreira 4 days ago |

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monkeetools 4 days ago |

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aitoolcrux 4 days ago |

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camilaferreira 4 days ago |

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ifil_ 5 days ago |

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chineduokafor 4 days ago |

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undefined 5 days ago |

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