Secret Santa
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Secret Santa

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Secret Santa

A tiny fun template showing how AI can help with teambuilding activities
This exploration is a fun and lighthearted one. But it is about a ritual, and
Coda loves team rituals
⁠
.
One of such rituals is Secret Santa 🎅. In case you don’t have it, this is when people on a team get to make small gifts to randomly assigned teammates without them knowing. Usually the “drawing” process for who gets a gift for whom is generated at random. I wondered what if we made it a little less random and let the language model figure out who, based on shared interests, could be the best match for giving them a gift.

About this template

This is a standalone doc. It is not meant to integrate with any of your existing docs. Instead, you should copy it each time you want to do matchmaking for your activity.
The whole template is built atop a single table of teammates (
DB Teammates
⁠
) and the logic / prompt are programmed in the
HLP Matchmaker
⁠
helper table.
​
⁠
⁠
The process is super intuitive with three steps:
⁠
Add Teammates
⁠
— either put them into a table or collect the data with a form.
Optionally
Set Don’t Match Lists
⁠
— to specify who mustn’t gift whom.
And finally,
Run The Matchmaker
⁠
!

Tailor to your needs

This template was designed around the Secret Santa ritual because it’s a simple and approachable story. It is easy to understand and fun to play with.
That said, the actual goal behind this study was to find out whether Coda AI could be used for matchmaking in general. Therefore, I encourage you to copy this template and take it further.
Adjust the tables and prompts, and use it for:
planning brain dates and breakout rooms
breaking people into teams for various teambuilding activities
assigning code reviewers on rotary basis
plotting workplace affairs nope lol 😁
and whatever other matchmaking needs you may come up with.

Try it out!

⁠
Copy this doc
⁠
and start with the step one:
Add Teammates
⁠
.
​• • •

Follow me for all things Coda! ​
@CodaTricks
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⁠


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