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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

#12

Post by jd_ »

boplicity wrote: post #10

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 thin…

Thanks for the feedback! I’ll give GrokBot a closer look. We’re focused on being open source and decoupled from any particular model provider, but it’s great to see a lot of capable tools popping up in this space.

We do ship a QuickJS code interpreter, but otherwise, sandboxing is something we deferred until after launch to make sure we have time to get it right. LangGraph / DeepAgents, which we’re built on, already have the right hooks in place, though. :)

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

#13

Post by jd_ »

aaronax wrote: post #11

Why not use real email?

You mean giving each agent its own real email address? Startups like AgentMail are certainly doing that!

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

Was there a particular workflow you had in mind here?

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

#15

Post by jd_ »

sgc wrote: 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?

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

#16

Post by taylorhou »

jd_ wrote: post #5
taylorhou wrote: post #4

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

Thanks! I was pleasantly surprised with how naturally a lot of email idioms seemed to align here. In retrospect, it makes sense if you think of human-to-agent communication as another form of asynchronous communication.

yep. as someone who is inbox zero and treats my inbox(es) as task management, it all makes sense to me!

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

#18

Post by jd_ »

zdyn5 wrote: post #17

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

Thanks! I'm not overly familiar with Paperclip, but from the website, it looks to provide orchestration over a fleet of existing agent harnesses, whereas with Pizza Bot, we run the execution loops for each agent ourselves (built on LangGraph / DeepAgents). We also stick to a "thread" model (similar to email), whereas Paperclip seems to work on a task-based model.

It's an interesting alternate UX framing, for sure. It's possible there are scenarios where a different abstraction makes more sense, but I'm personally curious to see how far we can extend the email idiom!

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

#19

Post by jd_ »

taylorhou wrote: post #16
jd_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I was pleasantly surprised with how naturally a lot of email idioms seemed to align here. In retrospect, it makes sense if you think of human-to-agent communication as another form of asynchronous communication.

yep. as someone who is inbox zero and treats my inbox(es) as task management, it all makes sense to me!

Love it. Maybe "inbox zero" for agents would have been a better tagline! :)
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