alt Hacker NewsThis is cool! A couple of pieces of feedback as I am looking for something in this family of things but haven't found the perfect fit: 1. I have multiple inboxes, and want to have them work on multiple. 2. I would really like to have skills and mcps visible and understandable. Craft Agents does a nice job of segmenting by workspace and making skills and mcps all visible so I can understand what exactly my agent is set up to do (no black boxes). 3. I want scheduled runs. I don't need push, I actually kind of prefer just the reliability of scheduled, but push would be fine too. In particular, I want to: a. After each granola meeting save in obsidian (I did this in Craft Code for example, but I prefer your more built in approach here, this is nice). b. On intervals, check my emails. I want to give it information on who/what is important to me, and ping me. E.g. billing on Anthropic failed, ping me. c. I also want it to email back and forth to schedule with approved categories of things on request. Just get it on my calendar (share calendly, send times, etc). d. I want junk etc archived. e. For important things, update my knowledge graph (ignore spam, etc). 4. Tying into a to-do list that actually updates based on priorities, and suggests auto archiving things etc would be good.
In practice, i connected gmail and asked it: "can you archive emails that have an unsubscribe link in them (that are not currently archived)?" and it got stuck on "I'll check what MCP tools are available for email operations first." But i connected gmail through your interface, and I don't see in settings anything about it also having configured the mcp? I also looked at the knowledge graph and it had 20 entities, NONE of which I had any idea what they were. I'm guessing its just putting in people trying to spam me into the contacts? It didn't finish running, but I didn't want to burn endless tokens trying to see if it would find actual people i care about, so I shut it down. One "proxy" for "people i care about" might be "people I send emails to"? I could see how this is a hard problem. I also think regardless I want things more transparent. So for the moment, I'm sticking with Craft Code for this even though it is missing some major things but at least its more clear what it is: its claude code, with a nice UI.
Hope this was helpful. I know there are multiple people working on things in this family, and I will probably be "largely solved" by the end of 2026, and then we will want it to do the next thing! Good luck, I will watch for updates and these are some nice ideas!
Really appreciate the detailed feedback. There are bunch of great features that you are pointing out that are on our roadmap (will add whats missing). The agent can setup tasks on schedule and help manage them. You can try a prompt like 'Can you schedule a background task xyz to run every morning ...'. The background tasks would show up on the UI once it is scheduled by the assistant. However, you might have to connect the necessary MCP tools in your case.
On Gmail actions - we currently don’t take write actions on inboxes like archiving or categorizing emails. The Google connection is read-only and used purely to build the knowledge graph. We’re working on adding write actions, but we’re being careful about how we implement them. Also probably why the agent was confused and was looking for an MCP to accomplish the same job.
On noise in the knowledge graph — this is something we’re actively tuning. We currently have different note-strictness levels that auto-inferred based on the inbox volume (configurable in ~/.rowboat/config/note-creation.json) that control what qualifies as a new node. Higher strictness prevents most emails from creating new entities and instead only updates existing ones. That said, this needs to be surfaced in the product and better calibrated. Using “people I send emails to” as a proxy for importance is a really good idea.