My inbox averages 200 messages a workday. Half are noise. A quarter need a fast acknowledgement. The remainder need real work. The split is mostly stable, so the triage rules are mostly stable, so it is a good fit for an LLM.

I wired Aider to it. Aider is the AI pair-programming CLI — it has a shell, it can call commands, and it speaks Python natively. Pairing it with the Nylas CLI gives a triage pipeline that runs on my laptop in the background and surfaces only the messages I should personally read.

The triage rules

Three buckets:

Bucket Action What lands here

🔥 Action Star, leave unread Customer escalations, oncall pages, anything from my CEO

👀 Skim Mark read, archive Newsletters, build notifications, "FYI"

🗑 Drop Mark read, archive, mark spam if confident Cold sales, recruiter spam, marketing

A modest LLM gets these right >95% of the time.…