i automated the nagging

I live in a block of flats, which means I have to deal with a management company - which can be challenging at the best of times.

We currently have a leak in our ceiling and our indoor station unit for the doors hasn’t been working for a few weeks. First world problems, I know, but they’ve been dragging on because the cycle is always the same - I send an email, get an automated no-reply acknowledgement, a few days later an actual reply, I respond, then silence. Rinse and repeat.

I don’t think having to chase people is a problem unique to management companies - but I got tired of the mental overhead of it. Setting reminders, drafting emails, checking back through threads to figure out where things stand. There had to be a better way.

I’ve spent the last few weeks messing about with local LLMs, and thought this is the perfect opportunity to leverage a small model at home with real benefit (for me at least). I pulled together a simple react app to manage my “Follow-Up Agent” - I tag threads in my Gmail, it watches, and when the other side goes quiet, it feeds the thread into the local model with a prompt to draft a chase email in my voice and drops it into my drafts folder. My phone pings with a notification about the draft, I give it a quick glance/tweak anything needed and send.

The model reads the entire conversation before drafting and actually references current status and asks for relevant updates rather than generic “just checking in” filler. My inbox is still mine, the only content that ever leaves my network is the email I want to send in the end.

The more emails that are sent without a response, the more the tone ramps up - going from polite nudge to firm & direct. Which surprisingly took a bit of tuning, the first email’s the follow-up agent drafted were SAVAGE. Which I’m not sure is a reflection of my patience or the model’s impatience (or maybe just poor prompting).

It’s not revolutionary, it only does one thing, but it does it well. Two active threads so far. A few chases sent, a little progress, a lot of peace of mind.

Anyway, the ceiling is still leaking. But at least I’m not the one who has to remember to chase about it anymore…