genedai
Joined 10 months ago
Joined 10 months ago
It needed to create accounts, which means receiving verification
codes. It needed to send reports. It needed to check inboxes. Every
time, I'd hack something together. Resend for sending (but it can't
receive). Gmail API with its OAuth setup that takes half an hour. Or
just... doing it by hand.
So I built mails-agent. The idea is simple. Give your agent a real
email address, the same way you'd give it a tool or an API key.
npm install -g mails-agent
mails claim myagent
mails code --to [email protected] --timeout 60
That last command waits for a verification code to arrive and prints
it. Your agent can now sign up for things on its own.
I've spent years building products for people. This is the first
time I'm building something for agents, and honestly it's the most
fun I've had in a long time. It's a completely different mindset.
You're not thinking about UI or attention spans. You're thinking
about reliability, programmability, zero friction. Everything is an
API call. It just needs to work.
A couple of things I'm happy with:
1. It runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier (Workers + D1 + R2 +
Email Routing). I wanted this to cost $0. Charging per mailbox felt
wrong for something agents need as a basic capability.
2. It works as an MCP server, so Claude Desktop and Cursor can use
it directly: npx mails-agent-mcp
MIT licensed. Self-hostable. Deploy to your own Cloudflare account
with your own domain, or claim a free @mails0.com mailbox to try it.
I'd love to hear what you'd use this for. I built it for the signup
and verify use case, but I think there are agent email patterns I
haven't thought of yet.
Demo: https://mails0.comThe architecture is intentionally boring. A single SKILL.md file acts as a router: it maps 40+ user intents to 6 knowledge modules loaded on demand from a `knowledge/` directory. Each module contains frameworks, decision trees, quality gates, and anti-pattern detectors. There are 12 templates in a `templates/` directory. Total system: ~130KB across 20 Markdown files. No build step, no runtime, no API calls. You can read every line before installing.
What makes it different from just prompting "act like a PM": the knowledge modules encode actual domain logic. The finance module has 32 SaaS metrics with exact formulas and stage-specific benchmarks. Ask it about 8% monthly churn and it doesn't say "that's high" -- it computes `1 - (1 - 0.08)^12 = 63%` annual churn, flags it as a red severity indicator, and tells you the benchmark for your stage. The discovery module enforces Mom Test principles and catches "Solution Smuggling" (sneaking a solution into a problem statement). The artifacts module has 8 story splitting patterns and 9 epic breakdown patterns, not just a template to fill in.
The quality gate system is the part I'm most interested in feedback on. Every output passes through universal gates (assumptions must be labeled, outcomes must be measurable, no "Feature Factory" outputs) plus domain-specific gates loaded from the active knowledge module. The agent is designed to push back -- if you ask for a PRD without a clear problem statement, it will challenge you rather than generate filler.
Tradeoffs worth noting: it's CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, not MIT, since the knowledge modules represent significant curation work. It's also opinionated by design, which means it won't work well if you want a yes-machine. And it's optimized for Claude Code's SKILL.md convention -- it works in other editors that support Markdown skills but the routing system is tuned for Claude's context window management.
GitHub: https://github.com/Digidai/product-manager-skills
Install: `clawhub install product-manager-skills`