This week, Hugging Face launched an agentic toolkit that lets anyone build a working app for Reachy Mini, its open-source desktop robot. The toolkit works in under an hour, without writing a single line of code. Instead, an AI agent writes all the code.

To use the toolkit, users describe the behavior they’d like to see in plain English, and the agent writes, tests, and ships the code to the robot.

“For 60 years, robots were built by roboticists. As of today, they can be built by anyone,” said Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face. “When the software is open-source, and an AI agent can write the code, the gating that used to come from technical knowledge just disappears.”

For the entire history of robotics, three things stood between an idea and a working robot: expertise, expensive hardware, and weeks of integration work. Hugging Face said it aims to collapse all three. An AI agent replaces the expertise. The hardware is a low-cost, open-source desktop robot anyone can buy. The integration is a one-click flow on a website millions of developers already use.

Hugging Face is an open platform for AI builders, often called “the GitHub of AI.” Millions of developers and tens of thousands of companies use it to share AI models, datasets, and applications. In 2024, Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, the French maker of the Reachy line of open-source robots.

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Meet one of Hugging Face’s early uses

Joel Cohen is a 78-year-old retired marketing executive in the Raleigh-Durham area who runs CEO peer groups. He’s not a developer, and he has never worked in robotics. Cohen also colorblind and wears hearing aids. Hugging Face said it took him over two weeks to assemble his Reachy Mini Lite (it usually takes around 3 hours).

Then, Cohen built an app. He created a voice-controlled AI co-facilitator for the CEO peer groups he runs on Zoom. Reachy Mini sits on his desk. The robot is 11 in. (27.9 cm) tall and 6.3 in. (16 cm) wide, and it weighs a mere 3.3 lb. (1.5 kg).

When Cohen says, “Hey, Reachy,” it wakes up, listens, and responds. It has a personality, which Cohen calls his “VP of future thinking.” The system also has four facilitation modes, a bank of over 60 questions, and greets each of his 29 group members by name.

Mid-session, it can hot-seat a member, push back on a surface-level answer, generate a fresh question on the spot, or summarize the key themes before closing.

“I built this by describing what I needed in plain English. Claude wrote the code,” said Cohen. “No SDK. No robotics background. No developer experience.”

App store for Reachy Mini is now open

Reachy Mini’s apps live on the Hugging Face Hub, which is searchable, forkable, and installable with one click. If you see an app you like, you can duplicate it, ask the AI agent to change it, and publish your version. The company said it takes just minutes to create a new app.

In addition, every Hugging Face app also runs in a browser-based simulator, so anyone can play with its catalog without owning the hardware.

The Reacy Mini App Store has more than 200 apps and is available now. Users can build their own apps by asking a machine learning intern or their favorite agent. Some of the apps include:

• Joel’s Co-Facilitator — voice-controlled session companion for CEO peer groups
• Language tutor — listens to the user to help modify speaking accents
• Emotional Damage Chess — plays chess and reacts to every move, dropping its head on a blunder (“Oh no! Big mistake!”) and cheering on a winning combination
• Reachy Phone Home — anti-procrastination mode detects when users pick up their phones and calls them back to work
• Red Light, Green Light — the Squid Game children’s version, with the robot playing the doll
• F1 race commentator — calls Formula 1 races as they happen, live from the desktop
• Cook assistant — walks through a recipe step by step, hands-free
• Coding teacher — teaches kids to program in a simplified scripting language
• An office receptionist that Hugging Face co-founder and CEO, Clem Delangue, built in under two hours

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