Every morning, the same ritual: open email, scan subject lines, mentally sort “deal with now” from “deal with never”, accidentally archive something important, spend 20 minutes on a newsletter you never asked for. The irony is that you — a developer — have everything you need to automate exactly this. You just haven’t done it yet. This article walks through ai-triage, a local, privacy-first CLI tool that classifies your emails using a layered AI pipeline. No cloud API keys. No data leaving your machine. Just Python, SQLite, and a local LLM.