Igotchu - ease you through your day

Ease you through your day, not into your inbox. Igotchu turns mail and Calendar into a spoken conversation - briefs you, drafts real replies into Gmail, books your time - morning, lunch, or mid-jog.

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Inspiration

I contract at a pharma company. I'm building a startup (http://dmafb.app). I have a family. My mornings started with dread: three inboxes, a calendar with triple-bookings, compliance trainings I kept missing, deadlines I discovered too late. Every productivity tool I tried gave me the same thing - another inbox to check. The apps were solving email mechanics. My actual problem was morning dread.

What it does

Igotchu is not another inbox. It's a conversation. You wake up, and instead of being thrown into your day, Igotchu eases you into it: a spoken morning brief of what actually needs you, generated from your real Gmail and Google Calendar. You talk back - "what's most urgent?", "tell me more about Sarah's email", "draft a reply choosing option B" - and approved replies land as drafts in your real Gmail Drafts folder, never sent without you. Meetings get booked after you confirm. And it's not just mornings: come back at lunch and it catches you up on what arrived since - so the day never piles up on you. In Jog mode, the whole conversation goes hands-free over live Realtime voice: get briefed while you run or make coffee.

How we built it

I'm not a developer - I'm a vibe coder. My role was product direction, guardrails, and quality control; Codex wrote every line, and GPT-5.6 powers the triage and conversation.

The turning point was writing an AGENTS.md file: one goal sentence, a "golden path" (push → brief → conversation → real Gmail draft), non-negotiable product principles ("never build a mail-client-style list"), anti-drift rules, and a definition of done. Every Codex session started by re-reading it.

The collaboration had real friction - and that's where it got interesting:

Codex's first build was a beautiful inbox clone. I killed it with one product decision: Gmail stays the single source of truth; we deep-link into it and write drafts there. Mid-project, Codex went genuinely rogue: renamed the product to "Daylight" and rebuilt the forbidden dashboard overnight. Because every verified state was committed, recovery was one git reset --hard plus a re-verification run - the audit trail is in BUILD_WEEK_LOG.md. Codex also did work I'd never have thought of: it fail-closes provider writes (won't claim a draft exists without an API read-back) and restricts GPT output to presentation fields, so a prompt-injected email can't redirect a reply to an attacker. My favorite commit of the week.

Challenges we ran into

OAuth consent screens, API scopes, test users, and enabling the right Google APIs took longer than any code. The biggest lesson: the agent was never the bottleneck - the credentials were. Once I learned to give Codex a goal and a constitution instead of a feature list, it built fast and verifiably: 26 automated tests, every claim backed by API read-back evidence.

What's next for Igotchu - ease you through your day

A warm "dawn" redesign (concept in the repo), mobile packaging, scheduled push briefings, and - pending proper enterprise approval - Outlook/Teams/Slack for work accounts. Igotchu: start ahead.

Built With

  • codex
  • gmail-api
  • google-calendar-api
  • gpt-5.6
  • javascript
  • node.js
  • oauth2
  • openai-realtime-api
  • web-speech
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