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How do I draft emails with AI, inline?

Type draft an email to my landlord asking for a rent reduction _ in the compose box itself and the draft is generated in place, signed with your stored name. That's the whole workflow: no chat tab, no template gallery, no paste. Drafting, rewriting, and grammar all run inside the field you'll send from.

Three drafting moves

  • Generate: draft an email _ or compose an email _ with any brief creates the draft where the _ sits. This is the transform blank's generative branch: an empty target means the model writes the whole thing.
  • Rewrite: write your rough version, then make this more formal _, translate to french _, or fix the grammar _. Your text is rewritten in place; cycling restores the original.
  • Fill: a templated draft with a hole, like Dear [Recipient Name], ... add recipient name Karen _, fills exactly the named slot and leaves other placeholders like [Date] intact rather than hallucinating them.

Signed like you, without leaking you

Identity context is what makes drafts come out yours: store your name, email, and sign-off once, and drafts use them. In the default safe mode the model only ever sees tokens like [FIRST NAME] and [SIGN OFF]; your machine substitutes the real values after the response, so your personal data never reaches the provider's logs. A tolerant post-processor handles model drift in token spelling and strips hallucinated tokens.

Where this works

Gmail compose is the showcase surface (fully supported, one-keystroke undo, even bold renders), and the same phrases work in any supported field: LinkedIn messages, web forms, and the terminal via oc-shell for that awkward email you're drafting in a scratch buffer. If the model can't produce a draft, the _ stays put and your text is untouched; multi-paragraph drafts are additionally protected by a fail-safe against wholesale wipes.

You still press Send

Boundary worth stating: OpenCues only ever edits the unsent draft. Nothing is submitted, sent, or acted on by the model; you read the draft, cycle or edit what you don't like, and press Send yourself. For ongoing polish while you write your own emails, continuous grammar correction (agentically correct spelling _) runs in the same box.

Related: Identity context · OpenCues on Gmail · Fix grammar as you type · GitHub repo