Surface unanswered emails from the past week
One practitioner notes that the builder wanted to recreate Affinity's Unanswered Emails tab powered by the Gmail API. Devin struggled with authentication, so he wrote that himself in Cursor. It produced a working function, a front end, and a public deployment in one late-night session.
- Agent or tool
- Devin
- Topic
- Software Development
- Reported on
- Blog
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Coding agents are moving from autocomplete to doing whole tasks: reading a codebase, making a plan and changing many files. This case is a concrete example of where that works in practice. It is one of 106 sightings filed under Software Development on Agent Sightings (number 77 by interest), and one of 20 involving Devin.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into Devin or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
In this repo, surface unanswered emails from the past week. Read relevant code, apply a minimal patch, run available checks, and summarize the diff. Stop before merge or deploy.
The prompt breaks down into 3 steps you can check as the agent works:
- In this repo, surface unanswered emails from the past week.
- Read relevant code, apply a minimal patch, run available checks, and summarize the diff.
- Stop before merge or deploy.
Tip: Work on a fresh branch, ask for a plan before edits, and review the diff and test results before merging.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Blog: https://jamesin.substack.com/p/hello-world-meet-devin. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.