Pizza Bot, a new open-source app from AWS engineers, gives long-running AI agents an email-style inbox

Pizza Bot, an Apache-2.0 desktop app for running long-running AI agents in the background, launched on 10 September at github.com/pizza-bot-app/pizza-bot. The project was built by Joseph Dolivo, principal technologist at AWS Startups, and colleague Igor Fil. The AWS launch post states plainly that Pizza Bot is a community project, lives in its own GitHub organisation, and carries no AWS support or service-level agreement.

The design starts from one sentence the launch post keeps repeating: "The interface assumes you are not watching." Finished work arrives in an Unread queue, anything the agent has paused to ask about arrives in an Action queue, and an Activity panel shows the specialist agents the main agent handed work to, with each specialist's own transcript. A chat window assumes both parties are present at the same time; Pizza Bot assumes the person who started the task has walked away.

How the run survives a closed lid

Pizza Bot is a server and a client. The desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux wraps both, starting a local server on the same machine and connecting to it the way a remote client would. A run lives on the server, so closing the thread, reloading the browser client or switching to the terminal client leaves the run going, and reconnecting catches up on what was missed. Put the server on an always-on host or in a container, and the same threads are reachable from a laptop, a phone or another workstation.

The runtime underneath is DeepAgents on LangGraph, LangChain's open-source graph runtime for stateful agents. LangGraph checkpoints the run as it goes, so a pause waiting on approval, a disconnected client or a crashed model call keeps the thread and loses only the step in flight. State, checkpoints, memories, attachments and logs sit in one folder as SQLite databases and ordinary files; the launch post describes that folder as the one thing worth backing up.

Which model, which tools, which network

The model provider is the operator's choice: Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter or a local model through Ollama. Extensions come through MCP servers and through Agent Skills, the Markdown packaging format Anthropic introduced earlier this year; the bundled browser skill uses Playwright MCP. Provider keys go to the operating system's secret store, the launch post says, and are never shipped to a browser client.

Pizza Bot listens only on the local machine by default. A deployment that is not local-only requires an API token and an explicit list of allowed origins; the server refuses a remote client without both. The SECURITY.md in the repository documents the full boundary and the private disclosure path.

Where this came from

Dolivo tells The New Stack that the project started in April 2025 as a side script called "JoeBot" for CRM logging, was rebuilt with Fil into an MCP server that ran parameterized recipes across internal systems, and grew inside Amazon to more than 2,000 users and over 30 contributors before being rewritten from scratch as this week's open-source release. The AWS launch post confirms the internal user count and says the name is a reference to Amazon's two-pizza teams. Amazon already has an open-source agent SDK, Strands Agents, released May 2025; Pizza Bot's own repository frames Strands as the lighter-weight option for agents whose control flow does not need to be a graph, and the AWS launch post pitches Pizza Bot as a finished application for people who just want the work done. Anyone shipping an ambient-agent workflow now has a reference implementation to fork.

Source

• Primary source: Introducing Pizza Bot, an open source inbox for AI agents that work in the background, AWS Open Source Blog, 10 September 2026.
• Reporting: AWS open-sources Pizza Bot: email-style inbox for background AI agents, Paul Sawers, The New Stack, 10 September 2026.
• Repository, licence (Apache-2.0) and creation date from the GitHub REST API, 11 September 2026.