✉️ Email · $20/mo

Can I vibe code Inbox Zero?

Open-source AI assistant that triages and cleans your inbox.

🟡Kinda — with gapsest. a weekend

The weekend version is real: a job watching your Gmail through the API, an LLM labeling each thread, drafting replies for review, and flagging bulk senders to purge. It works, and it's a great first agent project. The kinda is trust — an inbox tool must survive OAuth token refresh, rate limits, and provider weirdness silently, forever, while holding access to everything you've ever written. Also worth knowing: Inbox Zero is open source, so self-hosting the real thing beats rebuilding all of it.

The one-shot prompt
Build a personal Gmail triage agent — a weekend take on Inbox Zero (note the real product is open source and self-hostable if you want everything). Connect via Google OAuth with the Gmail API. Every five minutes, fetch new threads, classify each with an LLM into labels I define in a rules file (newsletter, receipt, needs-reply, cold outreach), apply Gmail labels, and archive what my rules say to skip. For needs-reply threads, generate a draft in my tone and save it as a Gmail draft. Add a /senders page ranking bulk senders with one-click archive-all and auto-archive-future. Next.js on Vercel with cron, Postgres for state, Claude API for classification.
Paste into Claude Code, Codex, or your agent of choice — then steer. Learn the moves in Prompt Engineering.
What you build

A Gmail-connected agent that labels new mail against your rules, saves draft replies for review, and ranks bulk senders for one-click cleanup.

What you give up
  • Outlook and reliable multi-account support — the weekend build watches one Gmail
  • Hardened token refresh, push sync, and retry logic that survives provider hiccups
  • Reply drafting tuned to your voice with mailbox-wide and knowledge-base context
  • A hosted, audited service holding your mail credentials instead of your cron job
Why people still pay

Two-click OAuth and someone else guaranteeing the sync never silently dies is worth $20 a month for a tool with the keys to your inbox — or self-host their open-source code for free.

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Actually build it

A prompt is the first move, not the whole game. Course 01 teaches you to take a prompt like this one to a shipped, working app — reviewing, correcting, and steering the agent the whole way.

Start Course 01 →