A venture investor who switched CRMs missed its unanswered-emails view, so he had Devin rebuild it on top of Gmail. Devin wrote and deployed most of it, but he had to write the login part himself.
- First reported
- jamesin.substack.com · 11 Dec 2024
- Added
- 13 Oct 2026
- Source checked
- 13 Oct 2026
What they did
He asked for a tool that pulls emails from the Gmail primary inbox and shows the important ones he has not answered, with an Ignore button saved to a database. Devin read Google's developer docs on its own, wrote the filtering logic and a simple front end, tested it and deployed it to a public link. It stalled on Gmail sign-in for about an hour, so he wrote that piece himself with another tool.
What happened
The poster says the email filtering and front end worked and were live after roughly a long night of work, while the database and Ignore feature were still in progress when he wrote the post.
Keep in mind
One person, one side project, written in late 2024 when Devin was much younger. He found it slow on some steps, such as an hour on a database setup he could do in ten minutes, and concluded it was not yet a technical co-founder.
Try it with your agent
Build a small private web app that connects to my <email provider> inbox with read-only access and lists emails from the last <number> days that look important and that I have not replied to. Show sender, subject and date, and add an Ignore button that saves to <database>. Do not send, delete or move any email. Tell me before you set up any login or account, and walk me through each step.
Replace the <angle brackets> with your own details.
Original source
jamesin.substack.comUser storySomeone who uses the agent described their own setup. Figures are theirs.
Tools for this kind of work
- RepoManage your Supabase database and projects from your agent
- RepoManage GitHub issues, pull requests and repos from your agent
