Gmail + Durable Workflows + Sandbox VM

Housecat is an email inbox running on an single-tenant agent computer, with a durable workflow engine and connections to common tools for day-to-day work.

My primary workflow is for customer support: get a support email, trigger a triage process, open a GitHub issue, code up a pull request, and update the customer along the way. My cofounder’s workflow is sales: get a customer email, enrich it with CRM info, research the company, and schedule a meeting.

Everything takes place in the same inbox UI. Housecat is designed to help us work more efficiently, not to replace us, nor to subject our customers to AI written slop.

Backstory

Our primary goal is to build great tools for everyday work.

Software development tools have gotten incredible over the years. Non-coding tools have stayed roughly the same and adding a chat side bar has not meaningfully improved anything.

We experimented with a lot of different approaches to new tools then realized that many of us still want an graphical user interface that looks similar to an (email) inbox. From there we started building experiences, tools and automations that do more work in the familiar inbox paradigm.

Technical Details

Housecat is a full agent computer plus a user interface.

Every user gets their own single-tenant sandbox VM and persistent SSD on exe.dev.

User connections to Google, Slack, GitHub, etc. are managed in an external service so the VM and agent are subject to external governance and don’t have direct access to secrets.

Durable workflows are built in DBOS. Running interactive and deterministic workflows directly inside an email couldn’t feel more different than chatting about emails in Claude.app.

The app is built on HTMX, Unix, Go, and SQLite (HUGS stack).

It has a web email client, interactive workflows, and agent chat UIs. Building these pieces are still a daunting challenge, but agentic coding changes the calculus here.

The app is source available to users and the Linux VM is fully open for a user and their agent to poke around.

Try It Out

Try it out at https://home.housecat.com/beta. It requires a Google / Gmail connection for the email app, which you can revoke any time.

A demo video is on YouTube:

Get In Touch

It’s still the early days for Housecat and this new era of tools for day-to-day work. Please get in touch with questions or feedback. We love your emails.