Short answer: David Petrou says Continua first built social AI for group chats like WhatsApp and Slack. When coding agents got good around September 2025, they put APIs on every dashboard so agents could run analyses overnight, which led to Wheelie.
Watch this answer from Episode 51 (starts at 5:29) · Episode 51 notes and transcript
From Episode 51: It Ships While You Sleep. The AI Agent OS a Former Google Engineer Built After Leaving Google., starting at 5:29.
Jordan Metzner [5:28]: Yeah. Tell us about Wheelie.
David Petrou [5:30]: Yeah. Okay. So Wheelie came about while we were working on our previous product. So I'm gonna spend just a few minutes on the previous one because it actually is important to not only how came to be, but also the opportunity that we see that's still unsolved with things like agentic coding. So before Wheelie, we were working very hard on something that we called social AI, meaning that everybody uses these chatbots and it's changed the world, but it's always in the context of what you might call single player mode. You type something, the agent responds, it's calling a response, but people are social. People work in groups. People collaborate. People are inspired by each other. So we thought, why don't we take an AI chatbot and put it into the context where people are already communicating, whether it's WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, Telegram, whatever. And then the AI can be really smart and have this kind of social awareness or social intelligence or etiquette on should it respond, should it hang back, how should it add value, should it take notes, Should it bring in information from the world that's happening right now in ways that can really help the group chat experience? And we saw tons of magical moments with that. We saw a lot of really interesting use cases. Around September of last year, so September 2025, we finally saw coding agents get good enough where they can operate somewhat autonomously. Now, obviously, we've been in this area and following this area for a very long time, so it's not like, we tried coding agents for the first time then, but it was the first time that it was really starting to click.
David Petrou [7:22]: I would say that our experience, we used chatbots, just from, like, web interfaces to do some coding. We pretty much skipped over the whole Cursor tab, revolution and kind of jumped straight into using agentic coding harnesses such as the one from pi, so pi.dev, a very, very nice one. And we saw that, boy, we could completely revolutionize our business by changing every single dashboard, every single piece of business intelligence at Continua instead of it being something that is just for a human to look at. You know? What do our costs look like? How many users? How many monthly actives? What's the retention? What if instead we threw an API on top of everything? Because once you do that, you can send off a hoard of agents to do all kinds of business intelligence analyses overnight, and you can have agents looking at logs and making sure that everything is working well. So this is the classic story of in Silicon Valley, you set off to build a. In order to build a, you build b. And then when you build b, you realize, oh my god. This is actually the bigger opportunity because every business out there is going to want to have access to better business intelligence, ways of making decisions faster, not to mention a better system for creating their software itself, which is what we're doing in Wheelie.
