DEV Community

Bees
Bees

Posted on

Two weeks of Bees in public: the numbers and what is next

#showdev #ai #opensource #buildinpublic

Bees went public on 13 Oct. It's a free, open source desktop app that runs a small team of AI agents on your own computer. On day one we posted the honest numbers. Here they are two weeks later, with what surprised us and what we're doing next.

The numbers

  • 17 GitHub stars, up from 15 on day one
  • 135 installer downloads across all four releases: 63 Linux, 39 Windows, 32 Mac
  • 39 of those were the newest release, 0.2.3
  • 142 repo views from 56 people in the last two weeks
  • 0 issues or pull requests from people outside the team

GitHub also shows 1,706 clones. Most of those are bots, so we don't count them.

What surprised us

  • Linux came first. We build and test mostly on a Mac, yet Linux is almost half of all downloads.
  • One conversation shaped the roadmap. A user offered a full Chinese translation, 932 strings, and asked if Bees could drive microcontroller hardware through an MCP server. Two of the three things below come from that one thread.
  • Most visitors came from bees.bot, then Reddit. Our dev.to posts barely show up in GitHub's list of where visitors came from.

What didn't work

  • We still can't see failures. No outside issues means a stranger's first run can break and we never hear about it. Nothing in the app tells us whether a first run worked either.
  • Most of our work went into fixing, not new features. We merged 24 pull requests since launch. Most fixed things we found by using Bees ourselves, and 0.2.3 was fixes only.

What's next

  1. The next release. Two things are already on main. You can open Bees from your phone with one command (guide). A team can also add its own MCP server, local or over HTTP, and pick which agents may use it.
  2. A translation layer, so that Chinese translation can go in, and other languages after it.
  3. Knowing when a first run worked, plus a short guide to connecting your own MCP server.

How to help

If you try Bees and something breaks or a screen makes no sense, open an issue. A one line issue is fine. If you'd rather not touch code, here are six small ways to help test.

Code and releases: https://github.com/Bees-bot/bees-desktop

Top comments (0)