I’ve been using Claude more as part of my productivity setup, so naturally I had to teach it about Beeminder. This is notionally a one-click installation, though your client should also prompt you to enter your personal Beeminder API token.
Rather than simply wrapping the API — which I’ve seen Claude and others wrestle with, since they encounter it without context every single time — I set out to design a set of tools that were more aligned to what I as a Beeminder user would be trying to accomplish. This is a viewpoint that I first encountered here in the context of AI. It’s not quite there as part of the helpful error messages and suchlike, but it should be a solid beginning.
What can you do with it?
Record progress against a goal, either for right now or for yesterday because you forgot. This was unexpectedly tricky to implement because all of the recently-updated flags serverside are very eager, so just like the iOS app it needs to poll the server after adding the datapoint while it waits for the goal to actually update itself.
List all goals, which effectively gets you the Beeminder dashboard. But with a twist, since I have a lot of conservative-slope-plus-autoratchet goals. The tool always checks for an impending ratchet and adjusts the upcoming deadline. Including changing the canonical sort order, so it will differ from the dashboard order if you’ve built up more safe days than tonight’s autoratchet will allow.
Speaking of ‘tonight’, you can configure your habitual start of day, so Claude can guide you about what needs to be done before bedtime today, not just what’s in the red. It uses start of day rather than bedtime as the dividing line, since you’ll need to be out of bed to make progress even on an earlybird goal. Defaults to 7am, so hopefully most folks won’t need to change it.
Beemergencies is the tool that lists those goals that are actually in the red, and presents them as being due either today or tomorrow — in relation to your bedtime/waketime, of course. This tool includes any goals that require data entry because of pessimistic datapoints (which you can add yourself as reminders!)
Calendial is the tool that lists goals that will come due in the week beyond the akrasia horizon. Cunningly, if you’ve put useful descriptive text in the goal’s fine print then Claude can help you make decisions about adjusting those goals.
Source & Acknowledgements
This is of course released with no warranty, expressed or implied. It works for me. The risk is yours.
- GitHub source
- Packaged DXT — install this one!
Inspired by @strickvl’s MCP server and building on @malcolm’s nodejs library. Thank you!