Casual Physics Enjoyer

If you are in London, and work on independent science, please DM me if you would like to join our meet-ups! Discord.

I’m trying to run the London Independent Science Society’s meet-ups with less work. The less work I have, the more meet-ups I can run.

But reducing work does not mean spending less time on it, nor caring about it less. I love thinking about how to curate a dinner, designing an agenda, and meeting people. And I want to spend more time on that stuff.

So to me, less work means reducing the friction involved with bullshit admin. This friction is like a cognitive hump that stops me from doing something easy, for no reason.

The usual way I’ve setup events is by first polling people’s availability on Discord and WhatsApp. And then setting up an event page in a tool called Luma that’s then shared around. This already involves three websites I need to click through (cognitive friction). And one bullshit admin task is making these event pages in Luma. It’s fiddly and involves me clicking buttons to set-up an event with its date and time.

I already spend time on WhatsApp a lot so polling availability is not a problem for me. So I wanted to make the Luma part smoother.

I realised Luma had an api. So I:

1. Set up a lightweight Hetzner server.

2. Got the Luma api.

3. Got Claude code to learn and test the Luma api by pointing it to the docs.

4. Created an model context protocol on my Hetzner server so that my Claude could interact with the Luma api via its ‘Customisation’ function.

   1. This model context protocol is basically a set of API endpoints that are invoked by Claude, which in this case, take the suggested time and place of my commands and shove it into the Luma api call.

5. Added OAuth to secure the end point to the server.

6. Done!

So now when I’m on Claude on my phone, on the bus or whatever, when I have a free moment all I have to do is ask my Claude app to make the event page for me! I can preload in the notes of the MCP my preferred time of day for coffee, as well as the geo-locations of the cafes I always pick. I can’t do automated bookings yet, but I can do this:

And it works… I can also tell it to update the description, reschedule it, customise the image and all that jazz. This is enough friction reduction for me to make scheduling a lot easier.

I’m thinking of making a website for the society too, and I can easily add to the MCP protocol list to add the events to the website. Easy!