SMF·FANTASTICAL
Can a prompt replace Fantastical?
Scheduling — booking links and calendar automation
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Fantastical's actual signature feature — type 'Lunch with Sarah at 1pm tomorrow at Cafe Luna' and get a correctly parsed calendar event — is a genuinely fun, scoped weekend build using an existing natural-language date library. What doesn't survive: the native Mac/iOS app polish, widgets, and years of parsing edge cases across dozens of phrasings and languages.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a natural-language quick-entry calendar tool. Use a maintained NLP date-parsing library (e.g. chrono-node for JavaScript) rather than writing your own date parser — that's a genuinely hard problem not worth reinventing. Connect to Google Calendar via OAuth. Provide a single text input: the user types something like 'Dentist Tuesday 3pm' or 'Team sync every Monday 10am for 30 min', the parser extracts date, time, duration, recurrence, and title, and shows a confirmation preview (editable before saving) rather than silently guessing. Write confirmed events to the connected Google Calendar via its API. Add a simple today/this-week agenda view pulling from the same connected calendar. Keep a small library of example phrasings in the README so users learn what the parser handles well versus where it's likely to misfire — being upfront about parser limits is part of the honest build here, not a bug to hide. Do not build a native Mac/iOS app, multi-calendar-provider support, or interactive scheduling proposals sent to other people — this is a single-user, single-calendar quick-entry tool, nothing more. Needs a Google OAuth app (free to register) to read and write your calendar; no other external service required.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 native Mac, iOS, and widget polish
- B.2 parsing accuracy across edge-case phrasing and multiple languages
- B.3 interactive scheduling proposals sent to other people
- B.4 instant cross-device sync
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: calendar integrations and reliability
The parsing library does most of the work for free; the other part — the phrasing nobody thought to test, rendered instantly and correctly, on every device — is what years of a dedicated calendar app buys.
Questions
Will it understand every phrasing the way Fantastical does?
No — natural-language parsing libraries are good but not as tuned as Fantastical's years of refinement. The confirmation preview exists specifically so a misparse gets caught before it's saved, not after.
Does it work on iPhone?
Not as a native app — this build is a web tool. You could open it in mobile Safari, but you'd lose the native widgets and share-sheet integration Fantastical actually ships.
Can I send someone a scheduling link like Cal.com's?
No — that's a different feature this build doesn't include. This tool is for entering events into your own calendar quickly, not booking meetings with other people.
What does it cost to run?
Just hosting for a small web app — a few dollars a month at most, since the parsing library and Google Calendar API are both free to use at personal scale.
Related tools
Receipt