PR agent sorts 19,411 emails and finds warm media contacts

Carly Martinetti@PRcarly

I just built my 20th agent with Claude. It’s getting crazy easy. Here’s the process I follow… example prompts and all:

1. Say what you’re building and why. Keep it to one or two sentences.
Example: “We’re building a CRM that tracks every reporter I’ve pitched so I know who’s a good fit for each story and who to check in with soon just to remind them I exist.”

2. Explain how it should work. Cover the inputs, the outputs, and how you’ll use it.
Example: “Search my email and LinkedIn DMs. Track when we last talked, the stories we did, and how they like to be pitched. Make it a page where I type a name or a topic and see the history.”

3. Ask Claude to improve your plan… because it almost always does.
Example: “Rewrite this as a step-by-step plan and tell me what you’d change and what I missed.” (It added a checkpoint so I wasn't automatically paying for research on reporters who never responded.)

4. Split the work between models so it doesn’t get too spendy.
Example: “Use Fable 5.1 to handle the strategy and build, and Sonnet 5.5 for standard research.”

5. Review the plan, not the code.
Example: “Explain each step of the plan in plain English.” (Py? JS? No idea, don’t care. I check that the process matches how I’d do the work by hand.)

6. Check in when anything gets slow or expensive.
(The LinkedIn subagent spent 15 minutes opening a single thread. We decided to grab only the last DM date and a preview line. No thread summary.)

7. Make it update itself.
Example: “Set a scheduled task for Monday mornings around 6:30 to refresh the data.”

What I don’t do:
- Hand over my passwords. When it needed LinkedIn, I signed in myself.
- Let it send anything. It’s read-only on my email and LinkedIn.
- Believe what it says without proof. Every pitch preference needs a source link.

It sorted 19,411 email threads, found 3,456 journalists, identified 336 I’ve worked with, and called 30 “warm relationships” (but we all know AI’s not perfect at counting).

And it runs an update every Monday at 6:34 AM. (Close enough to 6:30, Claude, close enough.)

P.S. If you’re already building, tell me what you’d add or do differently. If you have questions, ask away. I’ll answer in the comments.