Dean Mazlish Ecuador 4H AGO

Every RSVP tool I found wanted a monthly subscription to collect a few hundred yes-or-no answers, and none would return my data in a format I could use. So I built my own with Claude Code. The RSVP system is small: a form deployed on Vercel and embedded into our wedding website. We also emailed the direct link because plenty of guests might never visit the site. The form asks for more than a yes-or-no response. It collects meal choices, dietary restrictions, and plus-ones. Every submission adds a row to a Google Sheet through the Sheets API. That sheet ended up mattering more than the app. Months later, when it was time to create the seating chart, every guest was already represented in clean, structured rows that I could give to a completely different tool. For seating, I opened the same sheet in Claude and wrote out the rules in plain English: who had to sit together, who could not sit anywhere near each other, which relatives needed a quiet corner, and which friends could anchor a table of people who did not know anyone else. Claude produced a first draft that respected those constraints, along with an interactive board where I could drag people between tables. Step-by-step: 1. Tell Claude Code which fields you want on the RSVP form and have it build the front end and back end. Have Claude deploy it to Vercel. 2. Set up a Google Cloud service account, enable the Google Sheets API, and share the sheet with the service account’s email address. Configure each submission to append a row. 3. Embed the form on your wedding website and email the direct link separately. Some people will never open the website. 4. Ask for everything you will eventually need, not just attendance. Your caterer and venue will want meal counts and dietary restrictions, and going back to collect that information later is miserable. 5. When it is time to seat people, point Claude at the same sheet and write your rules in plain language: who must sit together, who cannot sit together, who needs a quiet table, and who can anchor a table of strangers. 6. Have Claude generate a first draft based on those rules, then move people yourself. This works anywhere you have a public form collecting data and a private tool that needs to reason about it. Put a spreadsheet between them instead of building one app that tries to do both. The form stays simple, and whatever you build six months later can read from the same place.