From Figma to AI: How Sim Studio Makes Agent Building Effortless

Sim Studio is a groundbreaking open-source platform designed to make building and deploying AI agents as intuitive as designing a slide in Figma. Co-founded in 2025 by Emir Karabeg and Waleed Latif, Sim Studio has already earned over 4,000 GitHub stars in just two months — a clear sign of how its lightweight, visual-first approach is striking a chord with developers, researchers, and AI startups alike.

Unlike traditional agent frameworks that require deep coding experience and a steep learning curve, Sim Studio democratizes access to AI agent development. By providing a drag-and-drop interface and deep tool integrations, Sim Studio empowers anyone — from solo hackers to enterprise teams — to quickly assemble and iterate on complex LLM-powered workflows.

How Does Sim Studio Work?

At its core, Sim Studio offers a visual interface — similar to the one popularized by Figma — where users can connect large language models (LLMs) to their favorite tools and services. Whether you're integrating Slack, Supabase, Pinecone, or Gmail, Sim Studio’s canvas makes it easy to design and visualize agent behavior.

Users can configure structured input and output for agents, define tool use with granular control, and orchestrate workflows through a modular layout. Once a workflow is built, it can be deployed in multiple ways:

As a chat interface for end-users
As a REST API
Triggered by incoming webhooks (e.g., Slack messages)
Scheduled to run periodically

This flexibility turns Sim Studio into more than just a development tool — it becomes a control hub for AI-driven operations.

What Problems Does Sim Studio Solve?

The current landscape of AI agent development is fragmented and overly complex. Developers often face two extremes:

Raw agent frameworks like LangChain or AutoGen that offer deep customization but require heavy boilerplate code, deep LLM expertise, and complex debugging.
Visual no-code tools that abstract away essential control and limit extensibility, making them unsuitable for anything beyond basic prototypes.

Sim Studio bridges this gap. It provides a production-grade development environment that retains full customization while making the experience highly intuitive. Users can:

Use hosted or local models (via Ollama)
Customize tool invocations
Design structured workflows with branches, memory, and decision trees
Monitor and iterate on performance visually

In short, Sim Studio brings the best of both worlds: simplicity and power.

Who Are the Founders Behind Sim Studio?

Emir Karabeg, Co-Founder and CEO, studied Data Science and Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley. He has a rich background in NLP and machine translation research and previously founded WorkNinja, an AI learning platform that scaled to over 300,000 monthly active users. WorkNinja was one of the earliest LLM-based applications to implement chain-of-thought reasoning at scale, launching in December 2022.

Waleed Latif, Co-Founder and CTO, also studied CS and Cognitive Science at Berkeley, where he led engineering for the Neurotechnology at Berkeley group. Before Sim Studio, he helped build the core backend infrastructure for Amazon’s Ring, which handles over 1 million transactions per second. His experience scaling backend systems at such high throughput directly informs the architecture and reliability of Sim Studio.

Together, they combine deep academic rigor with real-world production engineering at scale — a rare blend that explains Sim Studio's early success.

What Are the Key Features That Set Sim Studio Apart?

Sim Studio doesn’t just replicate what other agent platforms offer — it reimagines the experience entirely. Here’s what makes it special:

Visual Drag-and-Drop Workflow Builder
The Figma-inspired canvas means anyone can start building agents without diving into code, while still retaining the option for advanced customization when needed.
Multi-Tool Integration
Easily connect to services like Slack, Supabase, Pinecone, Gmail, and more. No complex SDKs required.
Multiple Deployment Options
Run your agents as an API, scheduled task, chatbot, or event-based responder — all from a single design.
Open-Source First
With 4k+ GitHub stars, Sim Studio’s community is growing fast. Users can fork, extend, and self-host the entire platform.
Support for Hosted and Local LLMs
Use hosted models or bring your own via Ollama, enabling true flexibility and privacy for enterprise users.
Granular Tool Control
Design precisely how and when tools are used within your agent’s decision tree, enabling complex behavior patterns.

Who Uses Sim Studio and What Can It Build?

Sim Studio is already being used by AI researchers, early-stage startups, and indie developers to create:

Customer service agents integrated into Slack or Gmail
Internal operations bots that handle database queries via Supabase
Research assistants that index and retrieve information from Pinecone
Automated schedulers or notifiers triggered by time or external events

With its open-source ethos and flexible architecture, Sim Studio is perfect for hackathon prototypes and production-grade agents alike.

How Does Sim Studio Empower the Future of AI Development?

Sim Studio sits at the intersection of AI, developer tooling, and automation — three of the most transformative forces in modern tech. By making agent development both accessible and powerful, the platform removes a significant bottleneck for companies looking to operationalize LLMs.

The shift from static software to dynamic, reasoning agents requires a new kind of tool — one that allows for experimentation, visualization, and iteration. Sim Studio is that tool.

Furthermore, by supporting open-source development and offering self-hosting capabilities, Sim Studio ensures that AI infrastructure can be both democratized and owned — a crucial concern in an increasingly centralized AI ecosystem.

What’s Next for Sim Studio?

With its Spring 2025 launch as part of the Y Combinator batch, Sim Studio is still in the early days, but the roadmap is ambitious. Future developments likely include:

Expanded model integrations (Claude, Gemini, Mistral)
Enterprise-grade deployment options
Plugin ecosystems and marketplace
Agent observability and debugging tools
Prebuilt agent templates for common use cases

Given the founders’ track record and the product’s current momentum, Sim Studio is poised to become a core part of the modern AI developer’s toolkit.

Why Should You Care About Sim Studio?

Whether you’re an indie builder, a researcher, or part of an AI startup, Sim Studio offers a rare combination: speed, power, and transparency. It’s a production-grade AI agent builder you can actually understand — and one you can own.

In a world racing toward intelligent automation, the ability to design, test, and deploy reasoning agents quickly and confidently may become a defining capability. Sim Studio is betting that visual, open, and programmable tooling will win — and so far, it looks like they’re right.