If you have spent any real time with Claude Code, you have probably noticed the same problem I did. You write the same instructions in the prompt every other day. "Use four-space indentation here." "Always run the linter after edits." "Format commit messages this way." After the third or fourth repeat, it stops feeling like a prompt and starts feeling like missing config. Skills are how Claude Cod
“Distributed systems” is a commonly used concept today. Perhaps the first time you read it it sounds daunting, and while there are plenty of challenges, the concept itself is simple and it might even give you more clarity when it comes to building this kind of system. Let’s start from… the beginning. When software went from being a possibility to being a reality (a virtual one, of course), things
Adding email and calendar tools to an AI agent is mostly an exercise in restraint. Give it 50 commands and the agent gets confused. Give it 5 carefully-chosen ones and it punches above its weight. After running agents against the Nylas CLI for a few months, these are the five I keep coming back to. Each gets exposed via MCP (nylas mcp install) so the agent can call them directly. nylas email send
You ssh'd into a fresh Linux box and you need to send an email. Maybe a backup completed. Maybe a deploy succeeded. Maybe a process crashed and you want a stack trace in your inbox. The traditional path: install Postfix, edit main.cf, configure a smart relay, generate SASL credentials, restart the daemon, and pray nothing else on the box uses port 25. That is the 30-minute path. The 60-second path
Your password-reset flow needs an inbox to test against. Your invitation flow too. Your email-verification gate too. The classic setup is a "[email protected]" alias on a shared mailbox, polling Gmail's API, hoping nothing else lands while the test runs. It is fragile, it leaks state across PRs, and your credentials live in CI. A managed agent account flips this. Each PR gets a fresh inb
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
You want to send a digest email at 7 AM every weekday, or fire a Slack alert when an "INVOICE" subject lands. Three tools claim to solve this: n8n, Zapier, and the Nylas CLI. They look interchangeable on a marketing page. They are not. I built the same five email-automation tasks in each. Here is what I found. Task Why it matters Send a daily digest from a Postgres query The "report by emai
Postfix has shipped 12 security advisories since 2020 (source). Each one needs a patch, a daemon restart, and a smoke test to confirm mail still flows. Twelve interruptions to ship, for a sub-system that exists to do one thing: hand a string to a smarter mail provider 50ms later. If your only outbound need is "send a templated email from a script", you do not need an SMTP daemon. You need a functi