Comment by Razengan

Comment by Razengan 3 hours ago

I have a couple banks that are peculiar in the way they handle transactions made in a different currency while traveling etc. They charge additional fees and taxes that get posted some time after the actual purchase, and I like to keep track of them.

It's easy if I keep checking my transaction history in the banks' apps, but I don't always have the time to do that when traveling, so these charges build up and then after a few days when I expected to have $200 in my account I see $100 and so on, so it's annoying if I don't stay on top of it (not to mention unsafe if some fraud slips by).

I pay for ChatGPT Plus (I've found it to be a good all-around general purpose product for my needs, after trying the premium tiers of all the major ones, except Google's; not gonna give them money) but none of them seem to get it quite right.

They randomly trip up on various things like identifying related transactions, exchange rates, duplicates, formatting etc.

> This feels like a task they should be great at

That's what I thought too: Something that you could describe with basic guidelines, then the AI's "analog" inference/reasoning would have some room in how it interprets everything to catch similar cases.

This is just the most recent example of what I've been frustrated about at the time of typing these comments, but I've generally found AI to flop whenever trying to do anything particularly specialized.

bogtog 3 hours ago

Thanks for sharing. I'm surprised you can't just ctrl-a + copy-paste your bank statement and get it to work easily

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CPLX 3 hours ago

If you installed Claude Code and put all your statements into a local folder and asked it to process them it could do literally anything you could come up with all the way up to setting up an AWS instance with a website that gives nifty visualizations of your spending. Or anything else you are thinking of.

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darkstarsys 3 hours ago

This is the right answer. Don't just feed the data to a chatbot; have it write code to do what you want, repeatably and testably. You can probably have working python (and a docker container for it) in under 30 min.

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Razengan 3 hours ago

I may try that, but at this point it's already more work wrestling with the AI than just doing it myself.
The most important factor is confidence: After seeing them get some things mixed up a few times, I would have to manually verify the output myself anyway.
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Re: the multiple comments that suggest to ask AI for code instead of feeding data to the chatbot:
I get what you mean, but I WANT the AI's non-deterministic AIness in this case!
For example, in some countries there are these "omni apps" that can be used for ride hailing or ordering food etc. The bank statement lists all such transactions with the same merchant name. I want the AI to do its AI thing to guess which transactions were rides and which were food deliveries, based on the prices and times etc. Like if there are multiple small transactions those are taxis, and the most expensive transactions during a day are my lunch and dinner.
And there are other cases, that would be too much "imperative" code that would fail anyway.
Like I said, this is a task that any human could do easily after a short explanation, but takes a hell of a lot of wrangling with AI.

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- dgacmu 2 hours ago
  
  This is exactly why you have it write code instead of analyzing the data. You can have tests, you can inspect then code, you know that the process will be deterministic. The chatbot LLMs are a bad match for bulk data analysis on regular, structured data. But they're often quite decent at writing code.
  
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- CPLX 23 minutes ago
  
  > Like I said, this is a task that any human could do easily after a short explanation, but takes a hell of a lot of wrangling with AI.
  Replying to your edit. It just doesn’t. It’s almost effortless and fast to do exactly what you’re describing, capturing the subjective judgement of AI, to do what you want.
  It took me a couple weeks to get very very good at it with good results in the first day or two. If you’re a competent programmer you’ll have the same experience and quickly if you get into the flow that’s being described to you.
  I’m the ultimate skeptic I understand where you’re coming from but these workflows are crazy powerful.
  
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- CPLX 2 hours ago
  
  I had the same vague impression as you did when using AI via browser/chat interaction. Like it’s very impressive but how useful is it really?
  Using it via the CLI approach as an entirely different experience. It’s literally shocking what you can do.
  For context, among many other things I have done this exact thing I am recommending. I just hit export on a Quickbooks instance of a complex multimillion dollar business and had Claude Code generate reports on various things I wanted to optimize and it just handles it in seconds.
  The real limit to these tools is knowing what to ask for and stating the requirements clearly and incrementally. Once you get the hang of it, it’s literally shocking how many use cases you can find.
  
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