Daniel Bachhuber Avatar

bb is the bee's knees

I can’t keep my hands off of bb. It’s the first piece of software in a while that I am totally addicted to using. Now that I’ve seen bb, I don’t ever want to go back.

The core premise is pretty simple: bb is a UI wrapper around your Claude Code (or Codex, etc.) sessions. It lets you spin up concurrent threads, and puts those sessions in the sidebar. It kinda looks like this:

The bb app with a sidebar of threads on the left and an agent conversation about triaging a Sentry error on the right

bb’s secret power is that it’s nailed the ergonomics of authoring customizations (inline agents and plugin architecture). You can modify bb just as easily as modifying whatever codebase you’re working in!

For example, I love GitHub’s “Mark viewed” feature:

A GitHub pull request diff with a file tree on the left and a “Viewed” checkbox in the file header

I can easily lose track of which files I’ve reviewed in bb, so I had bb spin up something similar:

A diff in bb with a “Viewed” checkbox on each file header; the first file is checked and collapsed, and the second is unchecked and expanded

Et voilà! If this isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Similarly, bb gives you a simple “Preview | Raw” by default for Markdown files:

The bb app with a thread in the middle column and this post open in the side panel, showing bb’s built-in Preview and Raw toggle

I wanted to be able to edit Markdown files inline, so I had bb spin up a Markdown Editor plugin. The Raw view is now editable and has a save button:

The bb app with the Markdown Editor plugin enabled, showing this post in Raw mode in the side panel with a Save button

So cool!

bb is a fascinating exploration of what “open source” means in 2026:

  • End users can legitimately and easily customize their software experiences with agents.
  • Making software malleable by end users can generate a step change in creativity. You can just try it out — there’s minimal cost in doing so.
  • What I want next: a new form of sharing changes that feels more like a PRD than software. I want to be able to follow someone else’s innovations, and then have my agent only apply the parts I like.

It’s not all smooth sailing, though: it’s a fair amount of effort to sort through all permutations of complex user experiences, and “delightful” isn’t yet the default description of the custom user interfaces.

Check out danielbachhuber/bb-plugins for my latest bb customizations. I’m publishing the ones I feel good about to the bb marketplace (search “danielbachhuber”). Let me know if you try it out, and what you end up building!