Building an autoratchet in Beeminder

I use beeminder for forcing me to complete a lot of my daily habits. I need the forcing function of being on the hook for a token amount of money to make sure that I do my goals or mark my goals. Overall, it's worked well.

The problem that I've found with Beeminder is that the goals are cumulative, meaning if I have a goal to do 3 actions per day and I do 4 actions on Monday, then I will only have 2 actions due on Tuesday. Generally this is not a problem, but for some things I want to make sure I do no less than 3 items each day.

Beeminder has a way in their web interface to automatically ratchet your goal down to your needs, and if you pay their monthly subscription you can automatically ratchet each day.

However, I didn't want to log in to beeminder each day, not pay for the autoratchet feature, so I implemented by own using Chat GPT.

Effectively I have a script running as a google cloud function once per day while I sleep. According to ChatGPT:

The autoratchet script works by ensuring your daily Beeminder requirement remains fixed at three actions, regardless of any extra actions you logged the day before. Here’s a summary of how it operates:

Fetch Current Goal Data:
The script calls the Beeminder API to get your current goal details, including your current progress (the “blue” value, or curval) and Beeminder’s notion of “today” (curday).

Determine Desired Red Line:
It calculates the desired red line for today as your current blue value plus three. This ensures that no matter what happened on previous days, you’re set to owe exactly three actions today.

Modify the Road Matrix:
The script then updates your goal’s “roadall” matrix by replacing all rows corresponding to today’s timestamp with a new row that sets the red value to curval + 3, while leaving rows for past and future dates unchanged. This minimizes the change to only what’s necessary for today.

Push the Update:
Finally, it sends the updated matrix back to Beeminder via a PUT request. This update “autoratchets” your goal so that even if you did extra actions previously, your daily commitment resets to exactly three actions.

This approach maintains the integrity of your future commitments (the “akrasia horizon”) while ensuring your daily goal is consistently enforced.

Overall it seems to be working and I am quite pleased with the outcome. In using ChatGPT I had to be aware of how the Beeminder API worked at a high level, but ChatGPT handled all of the nitty gritty details.