Devin builds an unanswered-email dashboard

Jamesin Seidel wanted to recreate an unanswered-email view that he missed after changing CRM tools. He gave Devin the goal of finding important Gmail messages that still needed a response. The first obstacle was authentication, and the agent struggled long enough that Seidel stopped and wrote that portion himself using Cursor.

With authentication working, Devin implemented a function to identify messages from the previous week. Seidel then asked it to restrict the search to the Primary inbox. He describes watching the agent open a browser, research Google's developer documentation and implement filtering and thread-response logic using the Gmail API.

The next request was a frontend. Seidel reports that Devin wrote it, tested it locally and deployed it to a public link. The deployed interface is the concrete outcome of the account. A later Supabase-backed ignore function was still being worked on while he wrote, so it should not be counted as finished functionality.

The useful workflow includes a significant human rescue at the boundary of account access. It also left Seidel uncomfortable with the distance between the agent's internal work and his own view of the code. This was his initial experience over roughly twelve hours, rather than a sustained reliability or email-classification benchmark.

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Source: jamesin.substack.com · Jamesin Seidel