Citizen developers now have their own Wingman

A vibe-coding application creation company, Emergent, has released Wingman, an autonomous agent that can address and take control of the applications used to manage daily tasks.

The company’s press release states: “The best technology should be accessible to everyone”, and cites the difficulty that users without a technical background have in creating software applications. It says that eight million founders of businesses from 190 countries have used its products to create and ship software described as production-ready.

Users of Wingman will be able to deploy a team of agents working on their behalf. “Now, anyone can have an always-on team working in the background, not just people who know how to build one,” said Mukund Jha, the co-founder and CEO of Emergent.

Wingman differentiates itself from similar platforms by dividing which tasks can be accomplished without human intervention, and which need a human’s OK to proceed with. Therefore, tasks like modifying or deleting data, or sending messages to groups, are suspended until the AI gets the go-ahead from its operator. The company defines these divisions as “trust boundaries.”

The platform can work by reading and controlling common applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, and can schedule tasks or have them triggered by preset events. A window of persistence (short-term context) means that users don’t have to repeat contextual instructions to the LLM for similar tasks. Connections to familiar platforms such as email, calendaring, CRMs, and GitHub come out of the box, with additional connections available from the company’s integration hub.

In concord with the platform’s easy-to-use ethos, connections between Wingman and other applications are achieved without the need to code elements such as API calls and key exchanges. This type of functionality is handled under the hood, without the users needing to be aware of the technical details.

Responses by Wingman can be adjusted in tone, so it feels like “a trusted operator rather than another tool to manage,” Emergent’s press release states. Wingman is powered by a choice of LLMs, including the latest models from ChatGPT and Anthropic, or users can opt for Emergent’s own AI instance to save costs. Sign-up is quick and simple, and users can choose the development of full-stack or mobile apps, or have the AI design web pages.

Plans are available for $20 or $200 per month if paid monthly, with introductory discounts available for those wishing to experiment with having an LLM act on their behalf via the applications they currently use every day. Apps are built using modern, web-native technologies for a professional front end to the ensuing code.

“Most people aren’t failing at productivity. They’re buried under the smaller tasks that never stop coming,” said Jha.

The promise of Emergent’s Wingman and similar offerings is the empowerment of the true ‘citizen developer’, where all that is required on the part of the business founder is the ability to elucidate their needs for software in their native language. The large language model works to achieve its interpretation of those needs using a body of data garnered by scraping the internet for existing code. This is then reproduced, partially randomised, and subtly altered to something close to the user’s goals. Most commonly, further iterations using compute token credits improve the output until satisfactory results are produced.

Although tools like OpenClaw and Wingman may be suitable at this stage for hobbyists with particular problems to solve, releasing software created in this manner for wider consumption makes some debatable assumptions about its inherent security and veracity – elements of the final creation that, although readable, will be impenetrable for the platforms’ intended market. Similarly opaque, Wingman’s ‘code review’ feature can be run on any application during the creation process, although the details of said review are best interpreted by technically well-versed users.

While individual office workers and entrepreneurs should be able to code something that achieves basic tasks, even with the caveat of human confirmation at possibly risky junctures, it’s difficult to envisage Wingman’s creations being seriously considered alongside software written by experienced software professionals in terms of safety, reliability, repeatability, and maintainability.

Wingman is available now.

(Image source: “Wingman” by Mr Mo-Fo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0)

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