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Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

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Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#111

Post by jorisw »

crowcroft wrote: post #12
kstrauser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an indep…

I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.

A point echoed by Nilay Patel (who used to be a law professional) here https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#112

Post by zknill »

bloppe wrote: post #107
golly_ned wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, the article says exactly the opposite.

The article was written by AI

How do you know?

There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#113

Post by luis_cho »

bloppe wrote: post #109
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #16

I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…

Finally being able to stop paying Intuit $150 every year as a reward for their lobbying against tax code simplification and free e-file is one of the most exciting possibilities for AI imo

Here in Portugal, tax comes pre calculated from the government on a free web application. It works very well! I just need to do very small adjustments every year before deliver the taxes.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#114

Post by danaris »

flomo wrote: post #105
swiftcoder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one feature of Windows 11 that could be so mandatory to a web app inside an electron shell, that it couldn't run on windows 10?

A big feature for Microsoft is you have to pay them lots of money to still run supported Windows 10. Are you paying Intuit too? Probably not. I say again this is really a filter against "high support" customers because most of them are not technical and running derelict setups.

That's not a technical reason.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#115

Post by conductr »

flomo wrote: post #88
kev009 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software. If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like https://www.freetaxusa.com…

Disclaimer that years ago, I was impressed at how slick the TurboTax website was. So I'm surprised they even still have a desktop version (...presumably not just some electron wrapper). And given how it works, I'd guess most of your data isn't staying local for much of this.

Their website is pretty garbage IMO. Every single click is a spinner image for 1 second while the layout adjusts and fetches data. I’m not certain if this is a react or vue or whatever FE JavaScript thing but it’s extremely prevalent across the web and pretty much completely defeats the purpose of having a SPA design.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#116

Post by danaris »

dtnewman wrote: post #24

1) this article doesn't really cite that this is due to AI. It cites a reuters article which in turn cites an internal memo, which says that they need to be focused, with AI being an important initiative. So the title is a bit misleading. 2) A lot of comments here talking about turbotax. Remember that intuit also has quickbooks. Personally, i think the uses for AI in doing my taxes are limited. I don't want AI making…

I can think of very few less appropriate places for LLMs than accounting.

They can't do basic arithmetic reliably, and will confidently tell you completely made-up figures when you ask for reports.

Meanwhile, existing accounting software is mature and does a great job at keeping numbers straight, and producing good reports, especially in the hands of a professional.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#117

Post by rcpt »

luis_cho wrote: post #113
bloppe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally being able to stop paying Intuit $150 every year as a reward for their lobbying against tax code simplification and free e-file is one of the most exciting possibilities for AI imo

Here in Portugal, tax comes pre calculated from the government on a free web application. It works very well! I just need to do very small adjustments every year before deliver the taxes.

In the US every Republican takes the Grover Norquist pledge to always make taxes as salient and as unpleasant as possible. The idea being that it will make voters more anti tax

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#119

Post by arwhatever »

bloppe wrote: post #109
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #16

I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…

Finally being able to stop paying Intuit $150 every year as a reward for their lobbying against tax code simplification and free e-file is one of the most exciting possibilities for AI imo

I used Claude Code to prepare my personal income tax return this year, and so far the IRS hasn’t come after me.

Had Claude generate yaml files for the input/source documents, then had it generate code to process the return into output yaml files.

Manually typed the results into the IRS Free File Forms website, and was pleased to see that it did some input validation.

Had it generate Code modules to match the IRS forms and schedules by name, keeping the nomenclature in code as close as possible to that in the official IRS instructions.

Spot checked a whole lot of it and found very, very little of it that needed correction.

Stored all of it in git so that I could monitor the diffs as it went along.

Maybe the neatest part was when I asked Claude why I wound up owing so much it gave me a list of reasons and dollar amounts in descending order.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#120

Post by Melatonic »

zknill wrote: post #112
bloppe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was written by AI

How do you know? There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.

It's becoming the modern adult equivalent of the old kids saying:

" I know you are but what AmI ? "

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