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Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

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Re: Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

#21
post #20

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

@aaronax had a similar thought!

In our case, we wanted to borrow the UX of email (to be intuitive to knowledge workers) but not necessarily the implementation.

Full control of your data was a design principle from the beginning, including being able to run fully offline with local models, so we didn’t want to add a dependency on email.

With that said, you can certainly hook up an MCP server and have the agents read and send emails (with human-in-the-loop approval) on your behalf.

Re: Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

#22
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!

Re: Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

#23

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…

Thanks so much for the feedback! The README arguably needs a diagram that shows the orchestrator-subagent delegation pattern and how they map to Skills, since you’re right - it’s not intuitive without reading the docs, and it’s somewhat unique from other agent harnesses I’ve seen.

The internal-only predecessor actually did let you specify the individual model for the subagent calls. DeepAgents supports this, so it shouldn’t be a big lift. I’ll add an issue on GitHub. Thanks for the request!

Re: Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

#25
post #15
post #14

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?

There are so many! Personally, I’ve been able to get remarkably far with the built-in filesystem tools (courtesy of DeepAgents) paired with a web search MCP (Kagi is great!). Were there any particular workflows you had in mind?

I need to be able to enforce structured output easily (json, and xml if possible). That would be my number one slightly less than typical requirement.

Other than that, I like to insert agents into deterministic workflows, so some way to easily have deterministic steps (calling a script rather than delegating to an agent, but determined by the workflow rather than the agent). However this second one is likely out of scope for a while, since it is the inverse of the typical agent workflow. I could probably work this out clunkily by polling the cli from an external master script, but it would be cool to have it all inside the box.

Re: Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

#26
post #25
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many! Personally, I’ve been able to get remarkably far with the built-in filesystem tools (courtesy of DeepAgents) paired with a web search MCP (Kagi is great!). Were there any particular workflows you had in mind?

I need to be able to enforce structured output easily (json, and xml if possible). That would be my number one slightly less than typical requirement. Other than that, I like to insert agents into deterministic workflows, so some way to easily have deterministic steps (calling a script rather than delegating to an agent, but determined by the workflow rather than the agent). However this second one is likely out of s…

Ah, this may actually work out of the box if you tell Pizza Bot to use its `task` tool to dynamically launch a subagent (which maps 1:1 with a Skill), and provide it with a `responseSchema`. I’ll test this when I’m back at a computer and report back!

Re: Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

#28
post #27

How would you compare PizzaBot to Herdr?

Thanks for the question! Similar to another user’s comment about Paperclip, Herdr looks to provide a layer on top of existing agent harnesses, whereas with Pizza Bot, we run the execution loops for each agent ourselves (built on LangGraph / DeepAgents). This gives us control over checkpointing, human-in-the-loop, etc., and the only “dependency” is your model provider.

I’ve been describing Pizza Bot as an “inbox” because it captures the UX, but this does seem to cause confusion and undercuts the fact that Pizza Bot actually is an agent harness itself, not just an orchestrator of agents hosted elsewhere.

Let me know if that makes sense!

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