AWS open-sources Pizza Bot: email-style inbox for background AI agents

Amazon Web Services has put out Pizza Bot, a new open-source app built around a simple idea: if an AI agent keeps working after the user walks away, a chat window is the wrong place to leave it. Instead of forcing people to keep a conversation open, Pizza Bot uses an email-style inbox. Finished jobs show up as unread threads. Anything that needs a human choice gets pushed to the front for review.

That design extends beyond the inbox. There’s also an Activity panel that shows work handed off to specialist agents, along with the tools they used and how far they got. The project’s creators say the whole interface assumes nobody is watching, which is a neat way of saying it’s built for pauses, interruptions and work that outlives a single session.

Despite the AWS branding, Pizza Bot is not an AWS service. It now lives as a standalone community project in its own GitHub organization, with no AWS support and no service-level agreement. It’s self-hosted, and the app runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. There are browser and terminal clients too. By default, it starts a local server on the developer’s machine, but that server can also run on an always-on host or in a container so agents can keep going while a laptop is closed.

Developers can choose the model behind it, including Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter or a local model through Ollama. Pizza Bot can also be extended with MCP servers and Agent Skills. One bundled browser-automation skill uses Playwright MCP to move around websites and interact with them.

Under the hood, the runtime uses DeepAgents, LangChain’s open-source harness for long-running agent tasks, which sits on LangGraph. The key feature there is persistence: LangGraph checkpoints state so a job can pause for approval, survive a disconnected client and resume later without starting over. Pizza Bot keeps those checkpoints, plus threads and other app data, locally in SQLite and ordinary files. Dolivo says AWS could have used Strands Agents, its own open-source SDK from May 2025, but LangGraph won out because of the tooling, the wider ecosystem and the lower friction for a project meant to be adopted by a community.

The project grew out of a “JoeBot” side project started in April 2025 to automate repetitive CRM logging. Dolivo and colleague Igor Fil turned that into Pizza Bot, and it eventually spread inside Amazon to more than 30 contributors and over 2,000 users. Once people outside engineering wanted in, a terminal-only tool stopped making sense. So the inbox won.