Keeping Up
Those who read this blog may recall that my partner and I moved to a small city in the Southern Tier of New York in 2024. Prior to the move, we lived in much larger cities in Virginia and Oregon that had active communities sponsoring hundreds of events per year. (My favorite is the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s Science Pub series.) These events were always well publicized and easy to attend.
One thing we quickly learned about living in less populated areas of the country is that word of mouth is a major communication channel for the same kinds of events. This has its charm, but as we were newbies to the scene it made it very difficult to know what was happening. Adding to our difficulties is the fact that Facebook is another primary channel for event announcements in these small cities. Having sworn off the evil empire years ago cut us off from the community we wanted to join.
Enter the agentic workflow! One Saturday morning, my partner and I were discussing our frustration when it hit me: I could build our own local-area calendar by fetching calendar data from nontraditional sources (web pages, blogs, city government sites, etc.).
I set about asking Opus (in Research mode) to find possible sources of event information for our area. I turned that data into a source specification which we then handed to Fable. Fable came back with a six-milestone build plan. Opus worked through it milestone by milestone.
I’m cutting the technical details short here, but in the end we had an online calendar that my partner and I subscribe to, which surfaces interesting local events including concerts, public lectures, farmers’ markets, and movie nights.
If you’re interested in the gory details, check out my project repo.