Let an app see only the mail you choose

Picture two ways to get help with your email.

In the first, you hand a capable assistant the keys to your whole inbox. It can read every message, write to anyone, and decide on its own what counts as helpful. It was built by a company, it runs on that company's servers, and it follows that company's idea of what you want.

In the second, you open a small app that does one thing: it adds your receipts to your budget. You decide which mail it gets. In Zapier, you write the filter yourself ("receipt emails from my grocery store") and Zapier passes along those messages and nothing else. The app never sees the rest of your inbox, so you only have to trust it as far as the filter you wrote. Your friend made the app, or someone in a budgeting group you're in, and you remix your own copy before you connect it, so the mail lands in an app that is yours and you can see exactly how it works.

The second one is the safer way to let software into your life, and it is how Vibes DIY is built.

The filter lives with you

Zapier already connects to your email, and you can see and change every rule it runs. Put the filter there and the line between "mail this app can see" and "everything else" is one you drew, in a tool you control, that you can switch off any time; delete the Zap and the mail stops. The app on our side only ever receives what crossed that line, keeps it where only you can open it, and uses AI to pull out the store, the date and the total. Setting it up takes one Zap on a paid Zapier plan, since the step that hands mail to your app is one of Zapier's paid features: Read the mail you choose from Gmail.

The same path works going out. Any Vibes app can hand a record to Zapier, and Zapier carries it to Gmail, Slack, a spreadsheet or a text. The setup is in Works with Zapier.

A sandbox is a promise you can read

Every app on Vibes DIY lives in its own sandbox. It gets its own data, its own address, and its own written rules about who can see and change what. When an app wants to reach one of your accounts, it has to say so ahead of time, in plain words, and you see those words on a consent card before anything happens. "Show your GitHub profile next to your entries." "Post to your Threads feed as you." Each app asks for the one thing it needs, and the platform holds the key, so the app never sees your password or your token.

That changes what you have to trust. With a do-everything agent you are trusting its judgment, every time, about everything it can reach. With a scoped app the reach is decided before it runs. An app that asked to post to your Threads holds that one permission on your account, however cleverly someone words a message to it, and the receipts app only ever receives the mail your filter passed. You still trust the app with what it gets, and a small app with one job is one you can read in your own copy.

Today an app can connect your GitHub, Threads, Instagram and LinkedIn, each through that same card. The details are in Connect accounts, and the rules for who sees your data are in Privacy.

Group chats get their own identity

You can also text Vibes, one to one or in a group chat, at [email protected]. Add it to the chat where your friends plan game night and ask for a poll, a signup sheet or a weekly planner, and the app arrives as a link in the thread.

Each group chat gets an identity of its own. The apps made there belong to the group, under the group's own name, and anyone in the chat who has linked their account can ask for a change. That makes a few good things true at once:

• Your own stuff stays yours. Your personal settings and memory, and the code of your own apps, stay in your one-to-one chat. If you ask in the group about one of your apps, Vibes reads it as you, under that app's own rules, and shares the answer there because you asked.
• You share what you choose. Linking your account to the chat lets Vibes act for you there, the way you could act yourself on the web, inside each app's own rules.
• Private things travel privately. Sign-in links and codes always come to you one to one, never into the group.
• The group decides together. Any linked member can build and publish, and taking a group app down waits for a second member's 👍.

The same app can serve many groups, and each group sees its own plans. Your book club's picks stay with your book club. More on what texting Vibes can do is in Build an agent.

Apps that answer to the people who use them

A big company's assistant carries that company's priorities into every task: what it recommends, what it keeps, which of its own products it nudges you toward. That is simply what it means to work for someone.

An app on Vibes DIY is made by a person, for a small number of people they know: a teacher for a class, an organizer for a league, a friend for a group chat. Most apps can be remixed, so when one isn't quite right for your group, you make your own copy and change it. The useful version spreads because people pick it, and the person who made it is usually someone you can text.

That is a different kind of software. It works for the people in the room, because the people in the room made it.

Bring your own assistant, keep the lines

If you already use Claude or ChatGPT, you can connect it to your apps. It works with your apps using your account's permissions, and each app's rules still apply. Builders running agents on their own machines can sign in from a sandbox too; the CLI guide covers it, and the about page has the bigger picture.

Start with one small job you'd love some help with, and text it to Vibes: