AI app-maker Wabi pivots toward a messaging-first experience

Wabi, the AI startup that let anyone use prompts to build apps, is undergoing a slight pivot as demand grows for AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct. The company announced this week that it is becoming an AI messenger of sorts — but one still capable of making apps to help users get things done.

The startup’s founder, Eugenia Kuyda, who previously founded AI companion startup Replika, described Wabi 2.0, as the new experience is called, as a “personal agent that does stuff for you and builds the interface you need in the moment.” It’s a similar value proposition to the original version of Wabi, but one users will interact with differently: instead of positioning itself against other vibe-coding tools, Wabi 2.0 aims to compete more directly with AI agents that combine conversation and productivity tasks in a single interface. That shift comes as companies including OpenAI think about how apps will work inside their own more generalized chatbot interfaces — the same day OpenAI announced an update to ChatGPT’s plugins that lets apps offer interactive experiences and a more visible spot in ChatGPT’s sidebar.

In a post on X, Kuyda explained why Wabi’s new experience will make more sense for consumers who want to do more than just type to an agent. “The more you use a chat-only agent, the worse the experience gets. Your history and ongoing tasks end up buried in one endless scroll. People don’t just want to type-type-type; They want to tap-tap-tap, scroll, and look. They love what agents can do, but they also like software,” she wrote. “The most powerful agent will be the one that combines both.”

The idea is that as a user asks the agent to perform a task, it could create a user interface on demand to help complete the request. Kuyda suggested users could build things like a calorie tracker, a weightlifting log, and a weight tracker inside a thread about health, or, in a thread focused on family, a calendar of kids’ activities, a language-learning app, an app tracking local kid-friendly events, and other tools related to parenting or household management.

“So far, personal agents have been one person, one chat, a stream of one-off tasks. We think the future is your agent, your apps, and your people in one place, running the parts of life that matter most, together,” Kuyda wrote. The new Wabi 2.0 app is currently only available by invite code, which is being handed out on X.

Why it matters

Wabi’s bet that people want tappable interfaces bolted onto their AI agent, not just a chat window, puts it in the same contested space OpenAI is now building toward with ChatGPT’s app-like plugins — a sign that “agent plus app” is emerging as the next battleground after the chatbot itself.