Bring HEY into Your Agent's Workflow with the hey Skill

Where this fits

Picture this: you're deep in a coding session, your agent is handling context switches, but your inbox is piling up and you need to schedule a follow-up meeting. Instead of breaking flow, your agent can directly interact with HEY—reading threads, drafting replies, managing calendars, and even logging time. The hey skill bridges your AI agent to HEY's CLI, turning a productivity app into an actionable extension of your agent.

Why agents benefit

• Full email lifecycle: Read, compose, reply, forward, bulk-reply, and manage drafts—all with natural language commands.
• Unified productivity: Beyond email, it covers calendars, todos, habits, time tracking, and journal entries, so your agent can handle multiple domains without switching tools.
• Precise thread control: Move emails to boxes, bubble threads, mark as seen/unseen, trash, spam, or ignore—actions that mimic your manual workflow.
• Contact and label management: Add or remove contacts, apply labels, and organize collections, enabling automated triage and categorization.
• Search and retrieval: Use hey search and thread-specific commands to find any email or event quickly, making your agent a powerful query interface.

Practical scenarios

Inbox triage while coding

Your agent scans unread emails, identifies urgent threads, drafts replies for approval, and moves newsletters to a "Later" box—all without leaving your terminal.

Calendar scheduling and meeting prep

Ask your agent to list today's events, find a free slot, create a new event, and even pull related email threads for context before a call.

Habit and time tracking automation

After a focused work session, your agent logs your time against a project, records a habit completion, and updates your journal—keeping your productivity data current.

Add it to your agent workflow

Install the skill with:

npx skills add basecamp/skills --skill hey

Then invoke it naturally. For example:

hey thread read --box inbox --limit 5
hey compose --to team@example.com --subject "Sprint review" --body "Let's sync tomorrow."
hey calendar list --today

Your agent will translate these into HEY CLI calls and return structured results.

Compare before adopting

Before integrating, evaluate the skill's quality signals—check the GitHub repo for recent commits, open issues, and responsiveness from maintainers. Compare with alternative HEY integrations (e.g., custom scripts or API wrappers) to see if they offer similar coverage. Also consider your workflow fit: if you rely heavily on HEY's unique features like Screener or Collections, confirm the skill's trigger list covers them.

Why it is worth tracking

This skill is authored by Basecamp (the company behind HEY), which gives it strong credibility and ongoing maintenance. With 68 stars and a clear trigger set, it's a low-risk addition for any agent that manages email or productivity tasks. Track it now to stay ahead of new commands and improvements—and see how it compares with other agent skills in the OpenAgentSkill directory. When your agent needs to handle HEY natively, this skill is a solid first choice.