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.