SMF·RECLAIM-AI
Can a prompt replace Reclaim.ai?
Tasks & to-dos — calendar automation
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
An auto-blocker for one calendar — read free/busy time, place recurring holds for habits and tasks inside preferred windows, move them when a real meeting lands on top — is a real weekend build. What doesn't come with it is two-way sync across multiple calendars, team coordination, and years of edge-case handling behind 'it never makes an embarrassing mistake.'
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on30.07.2026Build a personal calendar auto-blocker for one calendar: define habits and tasks in a config file with a name, duration, an ideal time window, a target frequency per week, and a priority. On a schedule, read your calendar's free/busy time for the next week and place holds for unscheduled habits inside their windows, highest priority first. Tag every event the script creates with a distinct marker so it only ever moves or deletes events it made itself — never anything else on the calendar. If a real meeting lands on a hold, move that hold to the next free slot in its window and log the change. Provide a dry-run mode that prints next week's placements as a table before writing anything, and a clear-all command that removes every machine-created hold.
Do not build scheduling links, team coordination, or juggling multiple calendars at once — this manages one person's one calendar, and it should never touch or decline an event it didn't create itself.
Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 multi-calendar and team coordination
- B.2 polished automatic rescheduling
- B.3 shareable scheduling links
- B.4 years of calendar edge-case handling
- B.5 someone else's uptime
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: calendar integration/reliability
Calendar automation is only valuable if it never makes an embarrassing mistake — people pay for that trustworthiness, which is mostly built from handling edge cases correctly, not from the core scheduling idea.
Questions
Can I import my existing Reclaim.ai habits and tasks?
Not automatically — Reclaim's habit and task definitions live in its own system with no structured export. Recreating them in a config file is quick, since it's usually a short list.
Will it work on my phone?
The holds it creates show up as normal events on any calendar app, including on your phone. Configuring new habits or tasks means editing a file, which isn't a phone-friendly workflow.
What does it cost to run?
Hosting for the scheduled script, 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?
Trustworthy edge-case handling. Reclaim has been tuned against years of real calendar chaos — overlapping holds, last-minute cancellations, timezone changes; a personal script here handles the common cases and will occasionally need a manual nudge on the unusual ones.
Related tools
Receipt