Is this software written by people or by AI? For Lookout, the answer is both, in different parts. We think you should know which part is which.
The core: written by people
Parula is the work of a small team that has written mail software for a long time, several of them on Thunderbird. Since the first commit in January 2021, they have written the parts that need years of experience: the protocols (JMAP, IMAP, EWS, ActiveSync, Graph and others), the local storage, the encryption, the account setup and the calendar logic. AI tools help with this work today, under the same rules as below.
The interface: written mostly by AI
The Lookout interface was written in October 2026, mostly by AI coding agents. Ben Bucksch, who leads Parula, described what Lookout should do and how the code must look, split the work into tasks, and reviewed the results. A UX designer reviewed the screens. The agents wrote the Svelte components and the tests.
This could work because Lookout doesn't change how Parula handles mail. It calls the same logic that the modern interface of Parula calls. While building Lookout, the agents were not allowed to change that logic. When they found a bug in it, the fix went through the normal review as a separate change, one bug at a time.
The rules for AI-written code
AI-written code goes through the same gate as code written by people:
- A person reviews every change before it is merged. Changes that don't meet the standards of the project go back.
- The tests run for every change.
- Lookout only gets commands that the logic of Parula can really carry out.
- The agents work from public documentation and from how Outlook looks and behaves. They don't use code from Microsoft.
This website
The texts of this website were drafted by AI too, from the source code of Parula and the notes of its developers. The developers read and checked them before they went online.