---
title: Email drafter
description: Custom assistant that drafts emails in the user's voice using loaded style guidelines and relationship context
category: example
ai-scale-level: context
updated: 2026-03-13
---

## Email drafter

**Summary:** A custom assistant loaded with your writing style, tone preferences, and relationship context. When you need to draft an email, you provide the recipient, the goal, and any context — the assistant produces a draft in your voice. You review and send.

**What makes this context-level:** The assistant knows your voice and adapts to relationship context, but you drive every interaction. It drafts; you review, edit, and send.

### Map

The recurring workflow is email composition. It decomposes into: determine recipient and relationship context, decide appropriate tone, draft the email body, review for voice and tone accuracy, send. The drafting step was classified as a good AI candidate — it's repetitive (multiple emails daily), structured (follows patterns by email type), and easy to verify (you read every draft and know immediately whether it sounds like you).

### Test

Initial test was a simple reply to a colleague. The first prompt included basic tone guidance and a few example phrases. Output was close but too formal — generic closings, overly polite openers. Adjusting with specific "do say / don't say" patterns (e.g., "open with substance, not acknowledgment" and "no generic calls to action") fixed the voice issues immediately.

### Integrate

Built as a custom assistant with a style guide loaded as reference material. The style guide includes: opening patterns (what to say and what to avoid), closing patterns (value-add insights instead of generic sign-offs), emoji guidelines, language rules (when to use which language for bilingual users), and structure templates for different email types — reply, outreach, scheduling, follow-up, delay notice. The assistant reads the style guide before each draft and adapts based on email type and recipient relationship.

### Compound

The style guide itself is the compound mechanism. When the user corrects a draft — "too formal here," "I'd never phrase it that way," "this closing feels generic" — the correction gets folded back into the style guide as a new rule or example. Each correction makes future drafts more accurate. Over time, the assistant needs fewer corrections because the style guide has captured more of the user's implicit preferences. The compound effect is measurable: early drafts might need 3-4 edits per email; after a few weeks of corrections feeding back, most drafts need zero or one edit.

### Related pages

- See: compound-engineering — The style guide refinement is a concrete example of a continuous improvement loop
- See: ai-output-verification — Email drafts are easy to verify because the user reads every one before sending