Infer event duration instead of defaulting every event to 30 minutes

[greatxp117]

The problem

Most forwarded emails give a start time but no end time. When that happens, every event lands on the calendar as DEFAULT_EVENT_LENGTH_MINUTES (30), so a dinner reservation and a standup get the same block. Start times are usually right; end times usually aren't.

The root cause isn't really the constant — it's the prompt. All five few-shot examples in getEventData showed end_time: undefined for events with no stated end time, which trains the model to leave it blank whenever the email doesn't spell it out. That's the common case, so the fallback fires almost every time.

The change

1. Ask the model to infer a duration (prompts.ts). Stated end times and durations are still used verbatim. When there isn't one, the prompt now asks for a realistic end_time based on what kind of event it is, anchored by a short table of typical durations (coffee 30m, doctor 1h, dinner 2h, wedding 4h, and so on), with instructions to adjust for agenda length, attendee count, and distance. The five examples now show inferred end times consistent with that table. end_time is still left undefined for events that are genuinely all-day or open-ended, or that have no start time.

2. Better fallback when nothing can be inferred (calendarHelper.ts). Google Calendar exposes the user's own defaultEventLength setting, which is what Google itself uses for events created without a duration — a better fallback than a hardcoded constant. It's fetched alongside the existing calendarList.list() call via Promise.all, so it adds no latency, and it needs no new OAuth scope (the app already requests full auth/calendar). DEFAULT_EVENT_LENGTH_MINUTES stays as the last resort if the setting can't be read.

The ICS path is untouched — those events already carry real end times.

3. Show the end time in the confirmation email (eventHandler.ts). Inferred durations are only useful if you can see them, and the reply printed the start time alone. A new formatEventDateRange helper, used by both the single-event and multi-event replies, prints the range: same-day events collapse to one date (Thursday, August 20th, 2026 at 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CDT), multi-day events spell out both ends, and it falls back to the old start-only string if an event has no end time.

Testing

Adds UT12.5, which forwards a restaurant confirmation with a start time and no end time, and asserts the created event is longer than an hour and at most four. The bounds are loose on purpose so it's a regression guard against the flat default rather than a brittle assertion about one model's exact output.

npm run lint is clean. npm run build has 9 pre-existing @types/express errors in routes.ts/drive/routes.ts on main — same 9 before and after this branch, none in the files touched here.

I wasn't able to run the full suite end to end (it needs live Google OAuth plus Resend and OpenRouter keys), so UT12.5 is unverified against the real model — worth a run before merging.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[moeadham]

Thanks for the proposed change. There are a lot of conflicts and many changes here. What branch did you fork to create this?

[moeadham]

I think you want to merge to 'master' not 'main'. Sorry about that.

[greatxp117]

No worries — retargeted to master. That was the issue: I'd branched off main, which is stale, so the PR was picking up ~30 unrelated upstream commits and showing conflicts.

Against master it's down to just my 2 commits and 7 files, and GitHub now reports it as mergeable:

• README.md
• functions/src/agents/calendar/calendarHelper.ts
• functions/src/agents/calendar/eventHandler.ts
• functions/src/agents/calendar/prompts.ts
• functions/src/util/config.ts
• functions/test/bindings/resendBindings.ts
• functions/test/test.ts

No rebase was needed — the branch was already 2 ahead / 0 behind master. Ready for another look.