I built a cold email AI agent for freelance devs in 8 hours — here's what I learned

I spent the last decade watching cold email tools get worse. Apollo. Lemlist. Instantly. Smartlead. Every one of them now ships "AI personalization" that pastes a first name into a template and calls it intelligence. Reply rates have collapsed to 0.7-1.5% on most B2B campaigns ( Saleshandy 2025 benchmark ).This week I sat down and built what I actually wanted: an n8n workflow targeting one narrow ICP (freelance devs), referencing one verifiable fact per email (their GitHub bio), and shipping in