alt Hacker NewsOkay, now do "all my transactions this year for retail stores"? Or "All luxury / deductible purchases"?
Of course when you arbitrarily limit the problem domain to some specific example, you can make any tool seem pointless and stupid. It's when you expand your goals to things that aren't trivial that you get benefits.
Do we need not Mathematica or NumPy because calculators can add just fine?
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What frustrates me is that there's the potential to bake much more information into transaction history.
There's a huge spec (Level III data) that lets the merchant provide full line item detail with every credit card purchase.
Corporate cards get it, but consumers don't. The payment ecosystem often doesn't even submit it if the card isn't identified as a corporate card.
If you had that, you'd probably need way less "smarts" to build budgeting tools-- no need to try to reconcile bank records with order reciepts.
Then you need to double check all the results because LLMs can't be trusted to accurately select retail stores or deductible purchases.
The funny thing is that these expanded examples were already features in the budget app I use before AI came along.