What problem it solves
Email is where commitments hide. Appointments, deadlines, renewals, “can you get back to me by Friday” — they arrive buried in prose, and either you transcribe them into your systems by hand or they silently become surprises. The obvious fix — let an AI read your inbox and act — carries the obvious danger: an inbox is an open port. Anyone in the world can put words in it. A system that turns inbox text into actions has to be paranoid about whose words it’s executing.
The thesis
Pipes move information; agents decide; provenance is sacred. The transport layer (connectors, polling, normalization) is deliberately dumb and lossless. The judgment layer (what matters, what’s a commitment, what deserves a draft) is small models with narrow jobs. And between the outside world and anything that acts sits a hard rule: third-party words can inform, but only the Principal’s words instruct.
Key features
- Announced autonomous capture. When the system captures something from email on its own, it says so — receipts issue from the choke point, so there’s a visible record of every autonomous read. No silent ingestion.
- Provenance gates (the P1 family). A third party’s email can never ride the capture pipeline as if it were my instruction. Source-threading is stamped and checked; the impersonation class of failure is guarded at the seam, with the ingress flagged as the injection-watch surface.
- Sender-aware handling. Sender classes decide how much of a message is stored and how it’s treated; a per-contact sender profiler builds a communication picture that feeds the reply drafter.
- The email loop, on existing rails. An orchestrator drives screen → capture → draft using the same spine every other segment uses — nothing bespoke, so every step is traced like any other agent run, and a captured commitment lands on the same calendar and to-do rails as a spoken one.
- A drafts hub where composed replies wait for a human send — drafting is autonomous, sending is not.
Highlights
- The provenance regression was caught, diagnosed, and closed the same week the capture pipeline went announced-autonomous — the exact failure mode this design is paranoid about, found by the system’s own verification pass.
- The screening/summarizing/drafting brains are cleanly separated from the transport, which means every piece can be swapped, benched, or audited alone.
Development log
July 8, 2026
Page created. This past week: announced autonomous capture with receipts, the provenance gate family (source-threading fix, sender-class gate, amplifier stamps), sender-profiler feeding the reply drafter, and Gmail-category-aware body truncation — the last survivor of the sender-class rollout.