I'm using a new agent app

Ben Tossell has a habit of falling hard for new tools, and this week's crush is an agent app called bb. Seven days ago he was singing the praises of t3, a mobile hub for juggling Claude, GPT and other subscriptions in one place. Now t3 is old news. Setup on bb took him about four seconds, he says, versus a fiddlier onboarding with its predecessor, and it behaves a lot like the familiar Claude or Codex desktop apps most builders already know.

What sets bb apart isn't the interface, though. It's that the thing can extend itself. Ask it for a task tracker and it builds one. Ask for a plugin that talks to a specific tool and it writes that too. Tossell says he had Prime Intellect's agent, Prime Agent, spin up a custom plugin for a coding tool called Factory just by asking. That self-modifying behavior traces back to Pi, a minimalist coding harness that's become something of a favorite among builders precisely because its simplicity makes it fast and easy to customize. Prime Intellect built its own agent on top of Pi rather than starting from scratch, and Tossell isn't the only one noticing the pattern.

He frames these desktop agent apps as the real successor to the IDE, not literally replacing tools like VS Code but making them irrelevant for a growing slice of users. The distinction matters to him: he wants to switch between GPT and Claude depending on the task, and any app that locks him into one model is a nonstarter. bb, by his account, doesn't force that tradeoff.

The piece widens out from there into something Tossell has apparently believed for a decade: that a large population of 'builders' — people who aren't professional developers but want to assemble tools for themselves — has been waiting for the right technology to unlock it. No-code platforms tried and mostly stalled, he argues, because they were clunky and boxed-in. AI agents, he thinks, spread by word of mouth instead, the way a language gets picked up through immersion rather than formal lessons. He cites a blunt line from an X post making the rounds: people don't want automation flows, they want to hang out with friends and not think about work. Tossell agrees, but insists that doesn't shrink the builder pool — it just means most of those builders will never call themselves developers.