The problem
I tried an AI assistant and loved two features: automatic Gmail labels, and a briefing an hour before each meeting. When the trial ended I did not want to pay for the whole product, so I built those two parts for myself.
Key decisions
Spend the model where it matters
Labels use the smallest model, briefings a mid-size one, and interview briefings the largest. Promotions and social mail never reach a model at all, so most email costs nothing.
Safe by default
Metis only adds labels — it never deletes, archives or moves mail. Briefings go only to me. Every script runs as a dry run first, and nothing leaves my machine except the model calls.
Knows who I’m meeting
Briefings read the people pages in my own knowledge base, so a meeting with a friend gets context, not a web search.
Outcome
I tested it on 126 emails the original product had already labeled. Three rounds of tuning took agreement from 67% to 83% to 89%. Briefings stay quiet too: over seven days, 25 calendar events produced 6 briefings.
It has since grown a daily work log, a morning job digest and an AI news brief, and now runs for three inboxes.