wtf is bb?

bb is an agentic coding IDE that is built to work on itself. Instead of being a normal app you download once and never touch again, bb is designed so that AI agents running inside it can control, customize, and automate the tool, which the project describes as laying the groundwork for a personal software factory. You can work with bb through several different surfaces: a desktop app, a web app, a command line interface, and an HTTP API, and all of them are treated as equally capable ways to drive the tool. Work happens inside threads that you can watch live as they run, step in and steer at any moment, or hand off to a different agent to continue. The project notes it is in active development, with the core architecture considered stable while the surfaces and workflows are still changing. The easiest way to start is downloading the desktop app, which currently supports macOS on both Apple Silicon and Intel chips. Linux users are told to run bb with npx instead, and Windows users need to install it inside WSL2, since native Windows PowerShell and CMD are not supported. There is also a Nightly build available for early adopters who want to test the newest automated builds alongside the stable version. bb relies on whichever AI provider command line tool you already have set up and authenticated on your machine rather than bundling its own model access. When you run the production app, it sends anonymous usage telemetry, such as app starts and message counts tied to a random per-install id, though no personal content or identifying details are included, and this can be turned off with an environment variable. For developers who want to build bb itself rather than just use it, the project includes a full development workflow built on pnpm, with separate commands for running the app, the server, and the desktop shell, plus tools for resetting local state and troubleshooting native dependency issues.