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.
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.
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.
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.
But it's not that. I'm GIVING it the data.
It's simple, I can do it myself:
Go row by row. See a certain phrase in the transaction description? Look a few rows ahead. Spot associated fees with just a glance. Write that group of transactions down somewhere else.
That's it.
I tried different kinds of prompts, from imperative to declarative, including telling the AI to write a script for its own internal use, but they just don't seem to get it.
> It's simple, I can do it myself:
> Go row by row. See a certain phrase in the transaction description? Look a few rows ahead.
Can you do it without looking at the document? Just by ear? Every time correctly? Without missing something?
Maybe by next Christmas?
In short, you are holding it wrong. ;-)