SMF·MOTION
Can a prompt replace Motion?
Tasks & to-dos — AI scheduling
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A greedy auto-scheduler for your own tasks — read calendar availability, pack tasks into free slots by deadline and priority, write the plan back as calendar events — is a real weekend build. What doesn't come with it is robust conflict handling across multiple calendars, team scheduling, and the years of edge-case polish behind 'just replan when something changes.'
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on30.07.2026Build a personal task auto-scheduler: tasks have a title, a duration estimate, a deadline, and a priority. Read your calendar's free/busy time for the next couple of weeks through its API, respecting configured working hours and a lunch block. Use a straightforward greedy algorithm — earliest deadline first, weighted by priority — to pack tasks into free slots, splitting anything long into smaller chunks. Write the resulting plan back as calendar events clearly marked as machine-created (a prefix in the title is enough), and make replanning delete and recreate only those marked events — never touch a real meeting. Surface overdue or unschedulable tasks visibly rather than silently dropping them. Run this on a schedule each morning so the plan stays current.
Do not build team scheduling, mobile apps, or meeting-invite handling — this plans your own solo work around a calendar it treats as read-only truth, and that's the honest, complete scope.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 multi-calendar sync
- B.2 recurring-work rules
- B.3 mobile apps
- B.4 team scheduling
- B.5 years of polish behind smooth automatic rescheduling
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: algorithm/integrations
People pay because the calendar stays organized without manual drag-and-drop — the automation has to be trustworthy enough to hand off to, which is mostly an edge-case problem, not an algorithm problem.
Questions
Can I import my existing Motion tasks?
Not automatically — Motion doesn't offer a structured export of its task list. Recreating an active task list by hand is realistic, since most people don't carry a large backlog of scheduled items.
Will it work on my phone?
The scheduled plan shows up as normal calendar events, visible on any calendar app on your phone. Adding or editing tasks, though, needs the small web page or CLI, not a mobile-native flow.
What does it cost to run?
Hosting and a database, typically a few dollars a month — the calendar API itself is free at personal usage volumes.
What's the one thing that doesn't survive the rebuild?
Graceful handling of a busy, changing calendar. Motion's rescheduling has been tuned against years of real conflicts and edge cases; a greedy algorithm here works well for a fairly calm calendar and gets rougher the messier your week actually is.
Related tools
Receipt