SMF·AMAZING-MARVIN
Can a prompt replace Amazing Marvin?
Tasks & to-dos — personal tasks, routines and daily planning
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A task manager with a few swappable prioritization strategies — sort by due date, by a simple eat-the-frog rule, by custom weighted scoring — is a genuine one-sitting build. What doesn't survive: Amazing Marvin's deep customization system letting users script entirely custom strategies, and its very large settings surface built up over years of power-user requests.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a task manager with a few swappable, built-in prioritization strategies rather than Amazing Marvin's fully scriptable strategy system. Use Tauri with SQLite. Implement standard task fields: title, due date, estimated time, project, priority. Build three built-in strategies as different sort or filter views over the same task list: 'Due soonest', a simple due-date sort; 'Eat the frog', which surfaces the single highest-priority task first and hides the rest until it's done or explicitly skipped; and 'Time-boxed', which shows only tasks whose estimated time fits in a user-set 'time available today' budget, greedily filling it. Let the user switch between strategies from a dropdown, applied live to the same underlying task list — the strategies are just different lenses on the same data, not separate systems. Add basic recurring tasks and a simple daily review screen. Do not build a scripting system for user-defined custom strategies, cross-device sync, or time-tracking integration — those are out of scope; three solid built-in strategies is the actual scope here, not an open-ended framework. Requires a local database; no external API key needed.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 a scripting system for fully custom user-defined strategies
- B.2 a very large, power-user-driven settings surface
- B.3 cross-device sync
- B.4 time-tracking integration
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: cross-device reliability and workflow polish
A few hardcoded sorting strategies are simple; a system flexible enough for users to script their own arbitrary prioritization logic safely is a much bigger, more open-ended design problem.
Questions
Can I create my own custom prioritization strategy?
Not in this build — it ships with three solid built-in strategies rather than Amazing Marvin's scriptable system for fully custom user-defined logic, which is real, more open-ended engineering.
How does 'eat the frog' mode work?
It surfaces only your single highest-priority task and hides the rest of the list until that task is done or explicitly skipped — a forcing function for tackling the hardest thing first.
Does it sync across devices?
No — this is a local, single-device tool with no backend to sync through.
What does it cost to run?
Nothing — it's a local app with no subscription, since there's no backend it depends on.
Related tools
Receipt