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Improving personal tax filing with Claude CLI and Obsidian

mrafayaleem.com

11–13 of 13 posts

Re: Improving personal tax filing with Claude CLI and Obsidian

#11
post #5

The problem with using markdown for this is that it's unstructured, so when the LLM does calculations on it, extracting data is error prone, you're never sure what exactly gets extracted, and it's then a hassle to verify (like the author had to do). In my app Superego ( https://github.com/superegodev/superego , shameless plug) I use structured JSON documents precisely for this reason, because with a well-defined sche…

> I use structured JSON documents precisely for this reason, because with a well-defined schema the LLM can write TypeScript functions that must compile. The intention of this is to reduce hallucination on information extraction, right? Also, how do you convert your docs / information into JSON documents?

> The intention of this is to reduce hallucination on information extraction, right?

Correct.

> Also, how do you convert your docs / information into JSON documents?

Right now you have to add it yourself to the database. The idea is that you use Superego as the software in which you record your expenses / income / whatever, so the data is naturally there already.

But I'm also working on an "import from csv/json/etc" feature, where you drop in a file and the AI maps the info it contains to the collections you have in the database.

Re: Improving personal tax filing with Claude CLI and Obsidian

#12
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use structured JSON documents precisely for this reason, because with a well-defined schema the LLM can write TypeScript functions that must compile. The intention of this is to reduce hallucination on information extraction, right? Also, how do you convert your docs / information into JSON documents?

> The intention of this is to reduce hallucination on information extraction, right? Correct. > Also, how do you convert your docs / information into JSON documents? Right now you have to add it yourself to the database. The idea is that you use Superego as the software in which you record your expenses / income / whatever, so the data is naturally there already. But I'm also working on an "import from csv/json/etc"…

Have you looked at qmd by any chance? Thoughts on that for sqlite vs qmd in this case? https://github.com/tobi/qmd

Re: Improving personal tax filing with Claude CLI and Obsidian

#13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The intention of this is to reduce hallucination on information extraction, right? Correct. > Also, how do you convert your docs / information into JSON documents? Right now you have to add it yourself to the database. The idea is that you use Superego as the software in which you record your expenses / income / whatever, so the data is naturally there already. But I'm also working on an "import from csv/json/etc"…

Have you looked at qmd by any chance? Thoughts on that for sqlite vs qmd in this case? https://github.com/tobi/qmd

Oh, interesting, I didn't know about this project, thanks for sharing!

I tried to implement something like this for the search functionality, but ended up going with "old school" lexical search instead.

Mostly because, in my experimentation, vector search didn't perform significantly better, and in some case it performed worse. All the while being much more expensive on several fronts: indexing time (which also requires either an API or a ~big local model), storage, search time, and implementation complexity.

And Superego's agent actually does quite well with the lexical search tool. The model usually tries a few different queries in parallel, which approximates a bit semantic search.

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