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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?

#41

Post by cowlby »

ariwilson wrote: post #36
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

I've been using Tiller since the pre-AI era. Plaid seems to be more B2B oriented so I haven't looked into it. But eventually yes that would be ideal to own the full pipeline.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#42

Post by mbm »

irishcoffee wrote: post #37

My spouse was almost scammed out of 25k the other day, by a person. There is no way in fucking hell I'll let an "agent" touch my finances. That is madness.

It's read only, we can't move money.

And I totally hear you -- we had this happen in our family as well, and it was really sad. Security is a massive priority for us, but it's always going to be a cost-benefit analysis for each person.

Happy to share more about our infra in a follow-up post.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#43

Post by thebruce87m »

cantrevealname wrote: post #40

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 soluti…

I thought that’s what Open Banking was supposed to solve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#44

Post by mbm »

cantrevealname wrote: post #40

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 soluti…

Hear you 100%. It felt very uncomfortable for me the first time I used it, as well.

The problem is that there sort of isn't a better way right now in the US, and for now, Plaid or a Plaid-like competitor is the safest way. Eventually, it would be awesome if there were clean, open APIs, and standards around this, but for now, it's the best we have.

The alternative of course for the DIY-er is some sort of browser automation, which honestly, is what I tried first. I really wanted it to work, but it didn't - which led us to Plaid.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#46

Post by jnfr »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #16

I’m Canadian and have been using https://lunchmoney.app/ for tracking with Plaid integrations. They have an api and I got llm to write a CLI for it. That way agent can pretty much pull the data it needs or wants. One thing I also had it do is build up a series of rules for tagging which then I run a cron for once a day. Every once in a while I just ask it to look over the rules and make new ones for uncategorized tra…

Awesome to hear! (founder of Lunch Money here :)- thanks for the shoutout!)

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#47

Post by apsurd »

mbm wrote: post #34
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 am…

> 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.

Quote of the week for me. well said.

~15 years ago I fumbled around with web programming basically because I never learned how to use excel in school. Nerded out with css, html, forms, then php and mysql to script together an unbelievably worse version of what a spreadsheet could do, but it was incredible that I could build something entirely made for my idea. And with the power to improve it.

Thank you for writing and sharing your story, it's motivating and comforting even. Good luck!

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#48

Post by cowlby »

mbm wrote: post #22
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…

That's so cool! Are you planning to open source any of this? Would love to see how you set everything up, or - maybe most interested in - some of your prompts.

It was all GitHub Spec Kit + Claude Opus tbh. I narrated a couple paragraphs of how I wanted to sync to flow and it knocked it out in one pass practically.

Here's the initial spec it created. I started off writing to a local sqlite db instead of Supabase: https://gist.github.com/cowlby/0dbeb52403c3f3c0f1d8122505203...

Edit: Here's also the DSL categorization spec. First one was string based, found it cumbersome, so second one was the Markdown table refactor: https://gist.github.com/cowlby/30d6b5cf132fc1424ab146f0eaf4a...

https://gist.github.com/cowlby/d569c8e05b5b6eecfd4d237372c06...

(edit: put in Gist instead of inline here)

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#50

Post by ForHackernews »

mbm wrote: post #42
irishcoffee wrote: post #37

My spouse was almost scammed out of 25k the other day, by a person. There is no way in fucking hell I'll let an "agent" touch my finances. That is madness.

It's read only, we can't move money. And I totally hear you -- we had this happen in our family as well, and it was really sad. Security is a massive priority for us, but it's always going to be a cost-benefit analysis for each person. Happy to share more about our infra in a follow-up post.

What makes it read-only? You told the AI "don't"?
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