Situation report: AI chat interfaces are getting crowded, and the startups that build apps from prompts are losing their edge. Wabi, the prompt-to-app startup from Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda, is changing course. According to TechCrunch AI, the company is relaunching as Wabi 2.0, an AI messenger that can still build apps to help you get things done.
Kuyda calls the new product a “personal agent that does stuff for you and builds the interface you need in the moment.” The goal hasn’t changed much. What changes is how people use it.
🎯 What Launched
Wabi’s first version was a vibe-coding tool: you typed a prompt and got an app. Wabi 2.0 puts that ability inside a messaging experience. It stops competing with other app builders and goes after AI agents that handle both conversation and productivity work in one place.
TechCrunch AI reports the change comes as demand for AI agents takes off, pointing to Meta’s Muse and Instinct as examples.
🛠️ Key Capabilities
- Chat-first agent. You talk to Wabi like a messenger, and it handles tasks for you.
- Interfaces built on demand. When a request calls for it, the agent creates a custom UI to finish the job.
- Topic-based threads. Conversations are organized by life area, and each thread keeps its own set of apps.
- Shared spaces. Kuyda describes the future as “your agent, your apps, and your people in one place,” which points to collaboration with family or friends.
📋 Use Cases on the Table
Kuyda gave two examples:
- Health thread: a calorie tracker, a weightlifting log and a weight tracker, all kept in one conversation.
- Family thread: a calendar of the kids’ activities, a language learning app, a tracker for local kid-friendly events, plus other tools for parenting and running the household.
What stands out is that these aren’t one-off answers. They’re small, lasting tools that stay attached to the conversation where you made them.
🧠 The Thesis: Chat Alone Breaks Down
Kuyda laid out the reasoning in a post on X, and her diagnosis is sharp.
“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,” she wrote. “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. The most powerful agent will be the one that combines both.”
This matters because it names a real weakness in today’s AI assistants. Chat is great for asking questions. It’s bad at tracking anything that lasts longer than one conversation. Anyone who has scrolled back through weeks of chat looking for a workout plan knows the problem.
⚔️ Competitive Landscape
- OpenAI is working on the same problem from the other direction. On the same day, OpenAI announced at DevDay an update to ChatGPT’s plug-ins that lets apps offer interactive experiences inside ChatGPT, with the app’s name pinned in a more visible spot in the sidebar.
- The difference is who builds the app. OpenAI brings third-party apps into chat. Wabi has the agent build the app for you, on the spot.
- Meta is pushing agents too. With Muse and Instinct in the market, consumer agents are becoming a race among the big platforms.
For a startup, that’s a tough neighborhood. Wabi’s advantage is focus. It’s betting on personal, custom software for everyday life, not a marketplace of big-brand apps.
⚠️ Caveats
- Invite-only. Right now you can only get Wabi 2.0 with an invite code, and the company is handing those out on X.
- No pricing details. TechCrunch AI’s report doesn’t say whether it’ll be free or paid.
- Still unproven. The health and family examples are Kuyda’s own. We haven’t seen how well the agent builds apps across real, messy requests.
🔭 Assessment
Kuyda has done this before. Replika showed she can build consumer AI products people come back to every day. Wabi 2.0 bets that the next interface is neither pure chat nor pure apps but a mix of the two, created on demand.
If the big platforms reach the same conclusion, and OpenAI’s DevDay news suggests they are, the question is whether a small startup can stake out that ground first. Watch how fast the invite list opens up. Full details are in the original TechCrunch AI report.