The agent is complete when it does the job without you. A time attached, a report back, and you read what came in.
7.08[BONUS]
Teaching it from the emails you changed
When you change an email Claude drafted before you send it, Claude never sees the change.
You make the fix in your inbox after the chat has ended, so the next draft comes back with the same mistake.
So have a job each morning put every email it drafted beside the one you sent, and ask you why each line changed.
ClaudeDrafts the email, ending “Happy to chat.”
YouChange it to “Let me know if you need anything from me!” and send
Each morningPuts the draft beside what you sent
ClaudeAsks why, and offers the rule, a check-in ends on an offer of help
YouSay yes, and every draft after reads it
It only ever reads the emails it drafted for you.
Nothing else in your inbox is opened, and every rule is shown to you before it is kept, so it only learns what you agree with.
Start by checking you have what it needs.
It needs a skill that drafts your emails from stage six, a connector that can read your sent mail from stage five and a timer from this stage.
Check you have what it needs
I want the emails you draft for me to learn from the changes I make before I send them, and before we set anything up, check I have what it needs.
Look in this folder for the skill that drafts my emails, check whether you can read my sent mail, and check whether this machine has any jobs on a timer. Tell me in one line each what you found. If any of the three is missing, stop there and tell me which it is.
Then have every draft leave a copy.
The copy is what the morning job compares against, and it leaves out your sign-off so your signature never reads as a change.
Keep a copy of every draft
Change the skill that drafts my emails so that every time it writes a draft, it also adds an entry to a file called drafts.json in this folder.
Each entry has who it is to, the subject, the date, the ID of the email thread if it is a reply, and the body of the email from the greeting down to the line before my sign-off, so my signature never shows up as a change. Put this step in the skill itself, and add one line to my brief so that an email drafted in any other chat gets an entry too. Show me both changes before you save them.
Then put the comparing on a timer.
Each morning it finds what you sent, writes down every line you changed, and tells you in four lines what it did.
Compare each draft with what you sent
Write a skill called compare-drafts that goes through drafts.json, oldest first, and for each entry not yet compared, finds what I actually sent.
1. Look on the same thread, or for a new email, to the same person with the same subject. Search my sent mail including the bin, because I sometimes delete my own copy after sending.
2. If the draft is still in my drafts, leave it for tomorrow, unless it has been there more than three weeks, when you mark it stale. If it has gone and nothing was sent, mark it binned.
3. If it was sent, take out my signature and the quoted thread under it, and compare what is left with the draft, ignoring formatting such as bold, line breaks and how links are shown, so only a change of wording counts. If they match, mark it sent unchanged. If they do not, write down each changed line as the draft beside what I sent, word for word, and mark it to discuss.
It only ever reads the emails in drafts.json, and it never changes a skill, touches a draft or sends anything. End each run with four lines, what it did, what it found, what it could not do and where the output went. Then ask me what time it should run each morning, put it on this machine's timer, and run it once now in front of me.
Note: The comparing runs on the timer and the rule-writing never does, because a rule written at seven in the morning has nobody there to say yes to it.
Then have the changes brought to you.
The next time it drafts an email, it shows you what you changed, asks you why and offers a rule, and only your yes puts the rule in the skill.
Bring the changes to you
Add a step to the start of the skill that drafts my emails, and a line in my brief so it holds in any chat, that before writing a new email you read drafts.json for anything marked to discuss.
For each one, show me the draft beside what I sent, ask me why I changed it, and offer one rule for the drafting skill that would have made the draft right the first time. Add only the rules I say yes to, then mark the entry done with the rule it became, or with no rule if I said no.
Then test it before you trust it.
Change one line of the test email it drafts to you, send it, and the comparison should find that line and nothing else.
Test it on an email to yourself
Draft a short test email to my own address, the way you would draft any email. I will change one line and send it.
When I say it has gone, run compare-drafts now and show me what it found. It should be the one line I changed and nothing else. If it is anything else, tell me what in the skill caused it and fix it.
Say no to a rule that only fits one client.
A good rule says what to do and why, like the one my check-ins learnt, that an email to someone who has gone quiet ends on an offer of help rather than an offer to chat, because the next step is theirs.
In the Claude app, you do the comparing yourself once a week.
Paste in each draft and what you sent with every name and number taken out, and put the rules you keep in the project you draft in, under Set project instructions.
Once a week in the Claude app
Below are emails you drafted for me this week, each followed by what I actually sent. I have taken out every name, company and number.
Go through them one at a time. For each line I changed, ask me why, and wait for my answer before you move on. Then write each reason as a rule for drafting my emails, one line each, and show me the list so I can say which ones to keep.
[EACH DRAFT, THEN WHAT YOU SENT]