Your AI agents' reports and questions have a new inbox, courtesy of AWS

AWS engineers have published an open-source AI agent management tool that treats tasks and permission requests just like emails that fill up an inbox.

Pizza Bot was announced on AWS’ open-source blog last week, where it was billed by its developers as a way to more easily manage agent tasks without constantly having to check a chat window to see if a task was completed or on hold because more permission was needed.

“You don’t send an email and then sit watching the outbox until the reply lands,” the Pizza Bot team wrote.

“Pizza Bot is shaped like an email client for the same reason: a thread is a unit of work you come back to rather than a session you have to attend.” Like the modern email services it mimics, Pizza Bot organizes communications with AI agents into message threads.

Finished tasks, along with detailed result writeups you’d expect from a colleague you’ve delegated your work to, end up in the Unread category, while anything you need to make a decision on is shunted to the Action category.

Asynchronous agent communication is likely to be a godsend for those balancing multiple tasks assigned to digital delegees, as the Pizza Bot team describes it.

“Live chat assumes both parties are present, which holds for a quick exchange and breaks the moment a task takes several minutes,” the Pizza Bot maintainers wrote.

Just like you don’t want to stare over the shoulder of the poor IT sod you sent off to do a task while you watch YouTube videos, no one wants to sit there and watch an AI agent do web research, or whatever.

“Pizza Bot treats an agent the way you’d treat a colleague who has gone off to do the work: it comes back when there’s something to read, or something only you can decide,” the PB team added.

Internal tool goes open source Pizza Bot, named for Amazon’s “two-pizza team” model (i.e., small, autonomous teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas), began life inside Amazon as an internal tool for AI agent uses other than software development.

According to its developers, non-coding uses they were exploring internally continually had the same requirements, namely working in the background autonomously and only bugging their user when they were done or had a question.

“None of those describe how anyone uses a chat window,” the Pizza Bot team explained.

“They describe how people already work with each other.” Email, they added, was the perfect design paradigm for internal use, and seeing whether it would work for everyone else meant opening the project to open source contributions.

As mentioned, Pizza Bot is open source - you can snag a copy for Windows, macOS, and Linux from its GitHub repo.