Show HN: Housecat.com – Gmail + durable workflows + sandbox VM

Show HN: Housecat.com – Gmail + durable workflows + sandbox VM(housecat.com)

15 points by nzoschke 33 days ago | 6 comments

Hey we are Housecat.

I've spend the last 15 years building dev tools at Heroku, Convox (YC S15), and Segment. Dev tools have gotten insanely good over the decades, now we're working to level up productivity tools for everyday work.

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 with the product is for customer support: get a support email, trigger a triage process, open a GitHub issue, spin up a coding agent to fix it, and update the customer along the way. All from the same UI and sandbox.

We've experimented with lots of different approaches to new workspace tools, and learned that many people still need a great GUI. We've landed on the email inbox as a very familiar and permanent surface and are building tools and automations directly inside it.

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

You can 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.

We'd love to share more and learn how the community here is managing email, agentic chat, and custom workflows for their work.

akotran 33 days ago |

How does this compare to the other emails apps that are all adding ai?

nzoschke 33 days ago | |

TL;DR we're building a unified UX / API / SDK / VM all around the concept of "inbox". Not just bolting AI on to search / draft / send.

First its a question of the shape of a product. There are a few paradigms:

1. Keep AI far away from my email

2. Side bar chat in email app

3. Chat app that can interact with email

4. Fully autonomous email agents

I don't like 4. At its core, real email is person to person communications, and we want to keep humans in the loop and actually writing thoughtful messages back and forth.

3 is here to stay, but I don't think most people actually want to free form chat or vibe code their day to day communications long term.

We can expect 2 in pretty much every SaaS but so far I'm underwhelmed by many experiences. An agent only truly works when it has great tools, and not many email providers or apps have great APIs or higher level tools and primitives other than "draft" and "send".

So first we're working on great tools for the human. Common templates, dynamic folders and labels, context from your CRM, integrated tools for your other workspace tools, easy ways to code customizations and workflows.

Next we're equipping the agent with the same tools to help you, only when you want it to.

Andrey28 33 days ago |

is the right way to think of Housecat kinda like Hermes Agent under the hood with an email interface?

nzoschke 33 days ago | |

Yes that's a good way to think about it.

We started as a hosted claw of sorts. But the less technical folks wanted something more than chats and markdown to do their work.

We then added a modern todo list interface. Having the agent create and update action items from email and Slack turns out to be genuinely useful, but having another TODO list to check wasn't as useful.

So we landed back on an email inbox. Having your actual email to work on, plus the "inbox" to also home other tasks and chats from the agent, is feeling very productive.

Andrey28 33 days ago | | |

makes a lot of sense to me. I used to work in finance and we spend the vast majority of our time in email. it’s the universal communication interface between any company / advisor. excited to try it!