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Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

driggsby.com

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Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#31

Post by amelius »

avocabros wrote: post #25

This seems like a solution looking for a problem. https://tiller.com/ works great and lets you do whatever calculations you want in a spreadsheet - and, bonus, it's never going to hallucinate. I don't quite understand the desire to have these verbose summaries that you have to read from LLMs. You'll notice anomalies if you just categorize each of your expenses every so often (easy with Tiller).

It's not the summaries.

It's the ease by which LLMs can ingest and combine various data sources.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#32

Post by apsurd »

Super cool writeup from a technology perspective. And a motivator to build more tools, play with MCP and try out Claude routines. The product pitch is also really clear. Good job all around.

Now for the criticism: back in the day mint.com was mind-blowing. It's what you always thought you'd wanted. The graphs were interactive and pretty and you really loved seeing them go up. Not so much down. I was so attached to the gamified aspects, much like step counters. They reinforce habits.

My mint journey ended with roughly 5 years or so of data, once they sold to Intuit, didn't like the ads and willingly syncing all my data to mega-corp. Much like Duolingo, it felt good at the time, but I don't know that it did anything for me at all.

Tracking is a double-edged sword: it really does build better habits. It's better to track weight every day for example so you better understand that fluctuations are mostly noise. The daily tracking stuff is entirely useful to get the need to track daily out of your system.

TLDR: checking my net-worth daily sounds like something I should coach myself out from. Ironically that probably takes tools, but the end goal is to not need them.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#34

Post by mbm »

apsurd wrote: post #32

Super cool writeup from a technology perspective. And a motivator to build more tools, play with MCP and try out Claude routines. The product pitch is also really clear. Good job all around. Now for the criticism: back in the day mint.com was mind-blowing. It's what you always thought you'd wanted. The graphs were interactive and pretty and you really loved seeing them go up. Not so much down. I was so attached to th…

Awesome feedback. Agree 100% with this. I guess a couple comments:

- We have a built-in CSV export tool in beta right now for cash transactions, and plan to add this for other datasets as well. You should be able to download your data when you want it. It's yours.

- Yes, tracking is great, but it also has a dark side. My sort of vision, at least for what I want, is less of a gamified finance tracker and more of an ambient, always-on agent that's watching for me. It knows my preferences, it knows what I care about, and it tells me when it finds something.

- Before we get there though, for now, it's really interesting to sort of tinker and build your own custom finance automations. As a programmer, it just feels liberating to get the data out of some closed banking app and into a space I'm comfortable in.

- Especially from an investing standpoint, it's been neat to pair our MCP with a much smarter model like 5.4 Pro and have it do long-horizon research tasks that require a lot of web research and correlation.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#36

Post by ariwilson »

cowlby wrote: post #20

I recently did this for myself using https://tiller.com/ to sync checking/credit-card transactions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then a GitHub action mirrors the spreadsheet to a free Supabase database. From there, Supabase MCP or psql gives Claude/Codex access to the transactions/balances for english queries. Really impressed with their ability to find subscription patterns, abnormal patterns, etc. Also to predict…

why not just use Plaid under the hood

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#38

Post by chickensong »

jonyeazel wrote: post #23

Used driggsby the other day. Friend of mine sent it to me. Suprising how easily it found all of my subscriptions. That was the main reason i tried it. I'm sure i'll dive deeper into it this week though.

Open a credit card that's just for subscriptions IMHO. It makes things really easy to manage and reason about.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#39

Post by mbm »

moltar wrote: post #33

Have to be careful with routines. There’s a very small disclaimer that’s barely noticeable that in routine mode all MCP tools, even write are always allowed. So agent can technically go rogue and start mutating your resources via MCP.

Indeed. Always have to be thinking about prompt injection when it comes to these tools.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#40

Post by cantrevealname »

To everyone who doesn’t know how Plaid works: You give your banking username and password directly to Plaid, and it keeps it (so it can continue to login).

I don’t understand how anyone is OK with this. It goes against every security principle and it’s against the terms and conditions of every bank.

I realize that almost no bank provides a secure and proper API to get info and/or to transfer funds, but Plaid’s solution is a disaster waiting to happen.

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