I’ve started using Claude to do something that I really shouldn’t have to: making calendar files.
Every organization that can offer a simple calendar URL that I can subscribe to wants to make it fancy (read: harder). The Giants baseball schedule requires you give them an email address, no doubt so I can be put on some marketing list. The youngest kid’s soccer league has a bug where I only can subscribe to the “home” games (despite every game, home or away, being held at the exact same field…). The adult rec league calendar awkwardly titles the events. And so on.
To fix all these little gotchas and obstacles, I tell Claude to read a website and create an ICS file, which it does with no sweat. And, it will even add little surprise tweaks like adding a checkered-flag emoji to the front of every F1 race.
Important note: If you point an LLM at a URL to create a schedule from, there is no guarantee that the timezone it’s fetched in will match your own. The workaround for me on this is to print-to-PDF the calendar and then tell the model to use that instead of the URL.
