Type the date. Do not open a date picker.

Capture has to be faster than the thought, or you stop capturing. A date picker is three or four interactions — open the field, page to the month, find the day, confirm — and every one of them is a chance to change your mind about whether the task was worth adding at all. The friction does not just cost seconds; it costs the tasks you did not bother to write down.

The usual fix in 2026 is to put a language model behind the input box. That solves the typing and introduces a worse problem: the same sentence can produce a different task on Tuesday than it did on Monday. A capture box you cannot predict is one you have to check, and checking is slower than the date picker was.

Dates go through chrono-node; repeats go through a Chevrotain grammar written for this purpose. Both run in the app on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no round-trip, and there is no monthly allowance of parses.

The practical difference is that it is testable. The recurrence grammar has a shared corpus of phrases and expected rules that runs on every build, so a phrase that worked last month still works this month. A model cannot make that promise, and the parts of the product that depend on capture — Today, Upcoming, the repeat engine — need it.

Dates are the ordinary English range: tomorrow, next tuesday, april 15, in 3 weeks. Dates always resolve forward — friday typed on a Saturday means the coming Friday, not yesterday.

Repeats are where the grammar earns its keep:

• every other week, every 3 days, every couple of months, every third monday
• every weekday, every working day, every weekend, every mon, wed, fri
• every last friday of the month, on the 1st of every month, on the last day
• quarterly, fortnightly, every 2 quarters, once a week
• until 30 april, for 6 times, x6 — a repeat that stops on its own
• every 3 months after completion, or the shorthand every! 3 months — the anchor that counts from the day you tick it

It is case-insensitive and the phrase can sit anywhere in the title, so water the plants every 3 days and every 3 days water the plants produce the same task.

The refusals are the reason it is trustworthy, so they are worth stating plainly. When the grammar does not recognise something it leaves your words in the title and sets nothing, rather than picking the nearest thing and being wrong.

A leading adjective is a name, not a rule. A task called Weekly report gets no repeat rule, and neither does Daily standup or Monthly budget review. Those are what people name things. Guessing a rule there would put a phantom repeating task in your list, which is much worse than doing nothing.

twice a week sets nothing, because there is no field for a count-per-period. every 5th tuesday sets nothing, because most months do not have one. every few days sets nothing, because it does not mean a number. daily on tuesday contradicts itself and is rejected.

Quick add with dates is table stakes, so the useful comparison is not whether an app parses text — they all do — but whether the thing doing the parsing is predictable, and what happens to it when you are offline.

The honest read: Todoist is the closest thing to a peer here, and on raw date syntax it is at least our equal — its recurring-date documentation covers ordinal weekdays, working days and end dates, and its Smart Quick Add is a parser rather than a model. Where we differ is the two ends of the sentence: TaskPocket parses stop-after-N-occurrences, and Todoist stores a time of day where we throw it away.