Solo Developer Builds AI Email Pipeline to Draft Support Replies Before Human Review

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A solo developer built an automated pipeline that pulls unread Gmail messages, classifies them using Anthropic's Claude API, and posts a drafted reply to Slack for human approval before anything is sent. The system categorizes emails by type and priority, assigns a confidence score, and routes messages to the appropriate team member using deterministic code rather than AI judgment. Three external dependencies and no web framework were used, with SQLite tracking processed messages to prevent duplicate handling. The developer noted that letting the AI directly assign human responders risked hallucinated names and inconsistent routing, so that logic was kept in a plain lookup table. The post also promises a cost-versus-time breakdown to substantiate the common but rarely quantified claim that AI tooling saves meaningful hours.

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