On: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loo...

[dhorthy]

i think the slack side is easy. I think an AI-optimized email communication channel is a long ways off. I spent weeks throwing things at my monitor figuring out reliable ways to wire DNS+SES+SNS+Lambda+Webhooks+API+Datastore+Async Workers so that everything would "just work" with a few lines of humanlayer sdk.

And what we build still only serves a small subset of use cases (e.g. to support attachments there's a whole other layer of MIMEtype management and routing to put things in S3 and permission them properly)

[TZubiri → dhorthy]

>DNS+SES+SNS+Lambda+Webhooks+API+Datastore+Async Workers so that everything would "just work" with a few lines of humanlayer sdk.

What are you smoking my man?

Write a python script that begins with the 2 following lines "import openai import email "

Simple is better than complex

[dhorthy → TZubiri]

hmm, like, i love simplicity, and I'm open to other approaches, but I specifically wanted to solve the "send an email to an AI Agent" sort of concept, and give that agent rails to talk back the the human. Doesn't `import email` require SMTP, DNS, signing infra, etc? can it set up MX infra and receive payloads from a mail exchange?

[TZubiri → dhorthy]

Import email IS smtp.

MX and SPF is as trivial as with providers. Dkim might be harder. But emails will still go through.

You can also rent an smtp server and have a similarly simple infra where you log in to the server to read and send emails.

If this is too complex, I'd recommend starting with a private protocol like discord, which is designed for kids, or telegram as an intermediate step.