Reset Expectations with Agentic Email

Clerk is a Agentic Email and part of a larger AI-platform. Clerk covers all 52 US jurisdictions: Congress, all 50 states and DC. It has access to billions of records going back nearly 20 years. It's for researchers, staffers advocates, lawmakers, lobbyists, citizens, anyone who wants to understand the democratic process, support or a oppose a specific bill, etc.

Ask about a bill, a vote, a committee, a member, a hearing, or a filing and "Clerk" reviews the actual record and writes back a brief with sources. Ask for a full report and get one with PDF attached and citations included.

The model runs on Amazon Bedrock through the Converse API. The loop is tiny: the model asks for a tool, I run it, hand back the result, and ask again.

The app is on Amplify and it queries an Aurora Serverless v2 through RDS Data API. It has about 20 tools over that data: bill search, action history, roll calls, committee rosters, hearings, even a diff between two versions of a bill's text. Email comes in through AgentMail and a small Cloudflare Worker that queues each message and posts the reply back to the thread.

Amplify cuts off a response at 30 seconds. Given the nature of the underlying subject matter testing resulted in some big I/O pairs. And because of Amplify constraints early development had us running one round per request and a loop outside the app, in the browser for the Inbox and in the Worker for email. At first it was an issue then it became a benefit.

Flipping the interface into an e-mail experience turned the negative constraints into a non-issue. Latency issues no longer mattered, generative outputs took on more scope, tools became easier to direct, general organization got better...if you're not staring at a streaming user interface configurability, organization, storage, search, labeling, chaining, tracing, observability all become much, much easier to solve for because you're not trying to solve each problems on a single screen in seconds.

Not signed in? No problem, Clerk has its own email account. You email Clerk it emails you back, or login to your designated Agentic Inbox (which, frankly, just looks and acts like common email providers).

Tasks become multiple tasks become email thread. CC's become multiple agents. Artifacts become attachments and citations become, basicaly, a signature block. No more searching conversations over vast stretches of time. Just check your Agentic Inbox, run a search there, or ask Clerk to read your emails.

Through a simple twist of design latency become less urgent, resources more numerous, inference more affordable, organization more familiar, answers more robust, citations more reliable, attachments more discoverable, chaining and tooling easier, and the end user is unglued from streaming . Try "Reply / Reply All" for chained outputs and multi-agent combinations (the Clerk is supported by a Librarian and Treasurer).