I built a custom Slack inbox. It was easier than you’d think. | Yash Tekriwal (Clay)

0:00I truly wake up to maybe 100 to 150 new Slack notifications, not even just like, oh, these are unread channels. Truly someone has tagged me. 60 to 80 % are more in the FYI category. So my 100 to 150 that's giving me anxiety is actually more like 30 to 40 that I really need to be on top of. You can use AI to do a task for you, like categorize things, summarize things, or you can use AI just to build a tool that would have been much harder to build before with very straightforward APIs and structured data. Exactly. Think about like a Kanban style board. You have in red on the left, action required, urgent.

0:36Yash needs to get back to it. In the middle, we've got a yellow need to read column. And then on the right in green, much more easy. I have a bunch of FYIs. I can just go ahead and click this archive all button. They'll disappear from the dash. And then those notifications will also disappear on my Slack. Oh, that's magic. And this is such a better way to just get through your queue. My dream is for someone else to watch this video and say, I want to build that app on top of Slack. And then I can go pay that person$15 a month for this app to be maintained and used. And then I can file bug reports with them instead of having to fix it myself, because I would happily pay that.

1:11Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Yash Tukaral, head of education at Clay. And he is a hyper-optimizer, showing us how he uses Perplexity Computer to work through the hundreds of Slack messages he gets every day. We're also going to debate, is SaaS really dead? Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Guru, the AI layer of truth for your company's knowledge. Here's the problem. Your AI is only as good as the information you feed it. Most companies are getting confident but wrong answers from AI because their underlying knowledge is outdated, incomplete, or just plain incorrect.

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2:38Welcome to How I AI. Yash, I'm so excited. We've been trying to make this happen for months and we've been trying to make it happen over Slack for months. And what I love about that is what we're going to start this episode off with is how you get yourself unburied from the deluge of Slack messages and emails and work you have to do on a daily basis. Yeah. So I wish I could say I had built this back when we were organizing it, but maybe that gives you a little bit more leeway for understanding me losing Slack threads all the time. For context, you can see my Slack screen right here. Right now, I cleared this truly two hours ago.

3:19I already have like another 40 plus messages of which you can see like eight or more are DMs. And it's just going to keep going up. Right now. Now, I truly wake up to maybe 100 to 150 new Slack notifications, not even just like, oh, these are unread channels. Truly someone has tagged me. It's a DM. They've tagged me. It's a group DM or something else, which all feel very important. But not all notifications are created equal in Slack. For example, I care much more about getting back to you on scheduling our podcast recording than I do about my colleagues' really fun comment on their dog that they posted a photo of in the fun dog channel.

3:59But I get an equal notification for both. And so what I sort of started doing with Perplexity Computer when it came out about a month ago is thinking if I could truly just design any software or like paradigm myself, what would I do, how, and why? And so Perplexity Computer is actually not exactly how we initially solved. the Slack problem. We'll come back to that in just a second. But I think the framework is also what matters most is I needed to be able to envision what does a better world look like instead of just asking Claude or Perplexity or OpenClaw make my Slack easier. And so that better world that I thought of is if not all notifications are created equal, then what if I could better categorize my notifications by DMs versus group DMs versus threads versus group at mentions?

4:47Because I treat all those differently. I try to clear my DMs ASAP because I tell everyone if I'm not responding within 24 hours, DM me. So that urgency needs to be there. But then on top of that, of course, people are DMing me about random things like who wants to go dancing this weekend, who wants to go to dinner for a hot pot this week, and all sorts of other fun things. So even within each of those four categories, right, the DMs, the groups, the threads, the at mentions, I also want to sub categorized by what requires real action from me? What do I need to read, but maybe doesn't need a response from me?

5:19And what are more of the like FYI for your information notifications? And as you might guess, a little precursor that I'll give you is like 60 to 80 % of my notifications every day are more in the FYI category. So my 100 to 150 that's giving me anxiety is actually more like 30 to 40 that I really need to be on top of. And that makes things a lot easier, But I need to build a system to get there. So if I could repeat your problem back to you, you're very important at work and also super fun and popular. And this is just causing you tons of ad mentions. And you're going to show us how you use Perplexity Computer, although I think you started with something else to kind of solve this problem and prototype your way out of it.

6:06Exactly. I think the other general framework I'll give here is that I do think something that I coach a lot of people on my team about as well is when to use AI purely, like an MCP even, versus when to use AI to build something deterministic like code or an API call. And so, for example, here in Slack, there's enough API endpoints available that we could get into that I know I should be able to build the information organization system just using code. And so actually I did that via my little, we can do a detour here, Jarvis, my open claw. Let's see if I can even find my, here we go, thread. It's a very long thread that we can come into all the way up on Slack.

6:55I'm not going to go through and do all of this, but you can sort of see in here a quick glance, it's building the digest for me, right? So it's looking at, okay, what is the timestamp? What do I want to mark? For example, Slack has a whole info chart that we could find online and then put in this if we wanted to on how they've built their notification system. It's very intentional. Whether or not it's unread or gives you a number or how many numbers it gives you is all dependent on the stream in which it comes in. And so for me to actually pull not every single new message in my Slack, because that would be overwhelming.

7:28But to only pull the ones that I care about with only the context that I care about requires a little bit of just systems thinking. I need to look at what was the last time I looked at the message. Did I look at only the most recent message or have I looked at another message in the thread before? Because then I don't need to see the whole thing. I just need to see only the most recent messages. So all of this data is tracked in Slack via these timestamps. And you can see me going back and forth with Jarvis here for a long, long time on what is unread, what is not, how do I look at these channels?

8:02And so this back and forth, which truly goes on for like thousands of messages so we won't do all of it, took me like a full day to really prototype and build and understand to get to a point where to be fair, now those 100 plus notifications come in to this Jarvis Digest channel in Slack. It does group it into direct at mentions. You've got those three sub buckets. Then we've got DMs. Then we've got group mentions. And then we've got threads. So those are the four overall buckets. And then within each of those buckets, I could now, and this is what I did for a week, just command click into each of these, open up a new thread, decide what I need to respond, come in, respond, and then go back.

8:46Just to kind of narrate for people that are maybe not watching the YouTube what we're seeing here. You basically said, look, I get this all-purpose inbox from Slack with notifications and unread. I get hundreds of them, of which maybe two dozen are actually interesting to me. I have a pretty clear sense of how I want those organized and prioritized in my own workflow. I'm going to spin up OpenClaw as a coding agent in Discord. I think I spotted Discord. And why Discord, real quick? So my one reasoning for Discord, I started on Telegram with OpenClaw like I think many people do. But I really like the threading nature of Discord for organizing all of my chats.

9:27For example, in Discord, my favorite command, similar to Slack, is command K. And then I can quick find, quick search any thread that I want. I can pick up the context where I need to and I can open and close those threads to keep it really clean in terms of what I want to stay active and what I want to stay inactive. Great. So you used OpenClaw and Discord to basically say, hey, I know we can reverse engineer how Slack determines what unread messages are and how they categorize them, which would be incredibly painful as a human because I'd have to go like knee deep in the docs, read a bunch of stuff, memorize all these codes.

10:02super annoying. You go figure that out. We're going to do a back and forth. And then we're going to build this automated Slack digest feed that pushes every day a very targeted list of unreads grouped by, again, things that are coming directly to me, things that are coming to a group, things that are in channels I care about for work, things that are in channels I don't care about for work purposes. And then even within that, they are prioritized and then they're deep linked. So you can actually go into that D &P leak, take action, bop out, and work through your inbox almost like a prioritized email inbox or a task list.

10:44Exactly. The only thing I would add to your great narration is that it's important to also note that pretty much all of what you just described while built with AI, the only place in which AI is repeatedly used in the system that was constructed is in the categorization of messages that need action from me, need to be read, or FYIs. YIs. Everything else is custom code built using an AI assistant, but it's truly still deterministic in the categorization that gets put out into the digest. And that just goes to your earlier point of like, you can use AI in these two ways. You can use AI to do a task for you, like categorize things or summarize things.

11:25And, or you can use AI just to build a tool that would have been much harder to build before with very straightforward APIs and structured data. Exactly. Okay. And then, you know, this is great. It's still, you know, to my naive eye, it's still pretty overwhelming, right? It's like a really long list of things. And so what was the next step you took here in terms of making this even more usable for you in your day-to-day? Yeah. So for context, right, for anyone that's not watching the YouTube as well, this message is helpful, but I have to scroll at least four to five screens down just to be able to even see all of the notifications that are already summarized for me.

12:05So you can also imagine just how much worse my actual Slack is. I used this for like a week and it was more effective, but it was also just draining. And so then my wish became what if I just had an actual software that I could build on top of this that looked clean, felt like superhuman for email, had navigability and let me sort of categorize this long digest of just text and emojis into a real interface. So that is where we come into Perplexity Computer. And so I will pull up Perplexity Computer here. And you can actually see right here, this is the digest that I ended up building. What we'll first do is even show you the thread in which I built this digest.

12:49So this one also had a fair bit of back and forth. but 80 % of what you just saw, which I'll describe for people not watching in a second, was built in like the first four messages. And I do think this is actually worth digging into some of the guts, right? I'm asking you to analyze the message structure in the Digest channel because via connectors and the browser, it has access to everything that I'm looking at. And then what I think is so good about Perplexity Computer that is unique to Perplexity and not Claude or OpenAI because they are frontier model companies is that they are shameless about using all of the different AI models to build each part of the task in subsequent order.

13:30So you can see here for fetching the digest, it was using Sonnet 4.6. Then you can even see down here, I believe it starts running different tasks in parallel. And you can see that it's using Gemini, I believe, for planning at some point. You can see that it's using Gemini for coding Python. You can see it's reading different skills that it's building. It then uses Opus for the actual build because that's more intense and it wants a little bit of a better layer of reasoning. And I could just keep going down and down, but all of this work happens from just my first message. So there's an additional layer of troubleshooting and intelligence and sort of testing for am I building the right thing that removes the need for me as a human in the loop to constantly go back and say, uh, you tried, good job, but also it doesn't work.

14:17Like it literally doesn't even do what I asked you to do. Try again. That frustrating, I have to reprompt you loop over and over again is much, much better with computer because of how they've built this ensemble orchestration. So let's take a minute to talk about Perplexity Computer because we haven't actually seen anybody demonstrate this tool on the podcast. And so why, you know, above dropping this in Cloud Code or Codex, which, as you called out, has its limitations in terms of being single provider in terms of model. You know, you showed you used OpenClaw as well to do a similar task. What has drawn you to Perplexity Computer and what do you think is unique about the setup?

14:57Yeah, it's a good question. So I think there's probably three things that really draw me to Perplexity Computer, ranging from simple to a little bit more involved. The silliest but simplest one is running things in parallel. In Cloud Code and Codex, I'm still having essentially a chat-based back-and-forth conversation. And so I'm doing one thing at a time. But often, I maybe want to kick off a task. I could do this in separate terminal windows if I really wanted to for Cloud Code, but it's annoying. I can actually just kick off, you can even see here in the screen, right? I kicked off like four different tasks in the span of 10 minutes of each other this morning and then had them all running at the same time.

15:35So that's one thing that I think is very simple, but concurrent runs and long running tasks are really nice in Perplexity Computer. Number two is that Claude, Cowork, and Codex sort of have these connectors so they can access your different apps, but they're primarily built for code generation. They're built for app making. I would actually say perplexity computer, while used often to build these UIs and tasks, and like those are the fancy things you might see if you go to use cases here. Like a lot of people are building apps because everyone thinks in apps. It's actually far greater than that, sort of in the same way that people discovered cloud code can do so much more than just coding.

16:12It's a really good local agent. But the reason I like the perplexity computer element is actually because it's in the cloud. Because it's in the cloud, it is much more natively connected to all these different tools. I don't have to go give it in the way that I give OpenClaw, right? Like access to different skills to be able to go do things in software. It can just go do it and ask me for logins on my own. And that native connection to all those tools helps me be able to do things much more fluidly at the speed of thought because everything is being recorded everywhere. So like a really easy example that I actually deleted because it was an accident, but I can just talk through real quick is I also use Notion AI to record all of my meeting notes.

16:52perplexity computer is connected to Notion AI. And so what I am always doing in all of my meetings is saying, hey, here's a bunch of follow-up things that we should probably do. Let's make sure we get them all done. I try and put all of those most important ones in my task management. But because that transcription exists, it's in Notion and computer has access to Notion, I can then also go into computer and say, look through all of my meeting transcripts from the end of the day today, gather the list of action items, categorize the ones that you think are important, throw them into my Asana if they're longer-term action items, and actually for anything that's just a message or a notification or an email, draft me the response.

17:30Can you show us what connectors you're using regularly just so people can have a sense of what you're talking about? Oh, you're using like all of them. So many. I mean, not even close to all of them, right? But for everyone listening, I've got the bare basics, Google Drive, Gmail with Calendar, Notion, Asana, Slack, forms, tasks, type form, Zoom, Spotify, which I haven't really used, but I thought it would be fun, you know? Airtable, Google Slides. And then there are tons of other ones I'm not using, like linear, Supa Base. I've looked at trying to use maybe like Snowflake more, Datadog more, but I'm focusing really just on what am I actually getting value out of today instead of chasing, I have what I would call shiny object syndrome.

18:14So one day I'll maybe get back to all the shiny objects. But for now, this is what provides the lion's share of the value back to me. Great. And then just to kind of like loop the thread back to what we were originally talking about. So you showed us Perplexity Computer. You really like it. Multi-model, multi-threaded, concurrency, nice to use, lots of connectors. And then you flashed at the beginning, but let's just show what you built for that Slack management tool because I think it's really cool. Yeah. So I'll do my best to visually describe this for those not watching. You can imagine a dashboard UI.

18:47It looks sort of like any task management tool you've had before. Think about like a Kanban-style board. But instead of multiple cards for all the sections of tasks that you've got, you've just got three main ones. You have in red on the left, action required, urgent. Yash needs to get back to it. In the middle, we've got a yellow need to read column. I should make sure that I'm understanding what's going on here, but I probably don't need to respond. And then on the right in green, much more easy, I have a bunch of FYIs. hey, here's what dinner is. Here's where the address is. Here's what someone is doing for the launch that we just planned.

19:20And so then there's a bunch of other smaller dials that I've customized on here. So I can group this like we were talking about earlier by order of operations. Do I want to go through my DMs first? Do I want to go through my group mentions first? I have a sidebar on the left that I can categorize those by. And then the best thing about this dashboard for me is that I use this all the time. The FYI notifications on the right, I can just go ahead and click this archive all button. They'll disappear from the dash. And then those notifications will also disappear on my Slack. That's magic. Because I know you can in Slack, I think you can do like mark all as read, but you can't be like mark my DMs as read or mark FYI as read or like multi-select.

20:03And so you're sitting there with either like 100 unread messages or zero. There's nowhere in between. and this is such a better way to just get through get through your queue and one thing I have to say was like there's this incessant debate of like is sass dead is like sass apocalypse happening like is who's going to build the new slack that's better is slack the new slack and what I love about this moment is like slack is still great like it's it's so good it's great for sending messages I don't know if it's great for reading messages but it's great for sending messages and you can with a very low effort say my company is using slack we're happy with it generally nine out of ten and to get it to ten out of ten i'm just going to build the thing that works with my brain and it doesn't even have to be about a deficiency of the existing software it just has to be you know closing the gap between your ideal workflow as an individual and what you get out of SaaS.

21:05And I just think it's such an interesting model as we think about what are these productivity tools going to become? What are these collaboration tools going to become? Is there Slack core and then Slack custom, right? And you just build on top of it. Yeah, I so agree. I would actually say maybe my very hot take here, I think you will see an explosion in software being created and used because of all these tools. I don't think the average person or even the proficient person is going to start custom by building and coding all these tools. I don't think the intelligence of AI, at least the way we're seeing it ramped currently, is getting to a point where my mom could go in and say, make Slack easy, and then it builds this.

21:51I think instead what will happen is you sort of, like you were saying, optimize these tools. and I'll be so honest. If someone else, my dream is for someone else to like watch this video, look at this and say, I want to build that app on top of Slack and then I can go pay that person $15 a month for this app to be maintained and used and then I can file bug reports with them instead of having to fix it myself because I would happily pay that. I agree. And what I think is so fun is I'm like a B2B girl. I've done product for a long time. There has always been this long tail queue of like customer requests being like, I would really just love it if that button in the bottom left of this page did this very niche thing for my specific vertical.

22:34Like that would be great. Wins it on the roadmap. And the answer is a reasonable SaaS PM is like never. And now you can kind of like replace this concept with, okay, point a forward deployed engineer at that and say like, we're never gonna build that for you. That's a you problem, babe. but let me show you how you can get that on your own and then again yes I agree with you I think kind of like two things are going to happen one just so many more creative opportunities for software to be built just as you said like somebody maybe will watch this and be like yes I'm going to build like slice slack digest as a product um the second thing is like there's probably like tam of this big for that product and because the cost of building it's so low who cares like somebody could go turn it into a 10k a month like project or a 20k month a project doesn't have to be venture scale doesn't have to like hit a billion dollars doesn't have to have a million users it can still like be useful yeah i feel like there's so much useful software that we could have because it's been so expensive to build and not worth people's time and i'm just i'm with you like let's go do more agreed yeah and then you know then slack can do the thing where they just go like this and like scoop them up exactly i can then acquire all those people i think you'll see a cambrian explosion of like businesses that wouldn't have existed without venture funding or that people wouldn't have wanted to build that can make their own money or get acquired by larger companies yeah yeah uh that's i mean that's basically what what i'm i'm doing right now so it's like i'm living it um i love this this is genius people take this This idea, think about the most, I often tell people to build their anti-to-do list and then spend an hour a day burning down that list, which is like, I never, ever, ever want to go through my Slack on Reds again in an unprioritized way.

24:28That's going to be on my anti-to-do list. So I'm going to spend an hour a day trying to figure out how to like dig myself out of that problem. Another one like I have is I never, ever, ever want to delete spam out of my email by hand. Like I so often have to go through and like click the checkboxes and delete. So I never. So like, how do I solve that problem? I never, ever, ever want to like manually, you know, hand to Asana, enter my action items after a meeting. And so this idea of an anti to do list, which I can share, I have a like a list of like 100 ideas that could go on an anti to do list and spending time with AI to automate those is such a worthy use of time.

25:08Totally agree. And I think computer is maybe another step in the journey of people just being able to do more with less. Yeah, it's just it's all getting better. This episode is brought to you by ThoughtSpot. Product leaders know the struggle. Your users want data insights, but they don't want to leave your app to find them. ThoughtSpot Embedded solves this by putting analytics directly into your product. Your users can search in plain English and explore data instantly, right where they work. No separate tools and zero context switching. What sets ThoughtSpot apart is that it's not just another bolt-on dashboard.

25:45It's a search-driven, AI-powered experience that feels native to your app. Developers can embed it with just a few lines of code and then fully customize the look and feel. The result? More engaged users, faster decisions, and a product that delivers more value every time someone logs in. If analytics is becoming core to your product strategy, visit go.thoughtspot.com slash howiai for more information and try the free trial at go.thoughtspot.com slash howiai slash trial. Okay, so you are a pro user. Any other use cases for a computer that you think are useful? Any other beautiful UIs you've built that you wouldn't have been able to do before?

26:31Yeah, so I'll actually show one other one that I've built, and then I'll show one that someone on my team has built as well because I think I'm trying to get everyone to be thinking about and using these tools. And they're both sort of different use cases. So I think mine, unsurprisingly, falls in the same thematic form of Yash has too much information, and Yash wants to consolidate the information and be really helpful as quickly as possible. So what I can show you here is, similar to the Slack Digest, I first just wanted to make sure, okay, am I actually getting the right things into this digest before I spend more time trying to make it pretty?

27:05And so I have a bunch of Slacks and emails. I realized I stopped reading the news because I've been so deep in Slack and email. So I want some news in there. And I could actually, and probably will add a couple of other communication streams to this long-term, but I just wanted to get those three in there. And so I got a couple of days of the text working in here. And then I was like, okay, the text, similar to Slack, also boring. Why not code up a UI. I will say computer seems to default to Kanban style pretty UIs. We've got another three Kanban cards here. It goes in order of AI news, email, and Slack in terms of what needs my actions.

27:41Obviously a little bit of a Venn diagram overlap with my Slack digest bot, but if I want to consolidate to just like truly mission critical, this is also really good. And in terms of talking people through what the iterative process here looks like, I can tell you right step one was getting the text in here and then saying, oh, that's actually not an important message. Can you tell me why you categorized it that way? And then explaining to computer how to rebuild the background skill it's using to make all of this categorization. Step two was then getting the UI in here. And then step three is actual usability.