Live data from Hacker News

Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

driggsby.com

131–140 of 141 posts

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#131
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve thought the same. Because the main thing a financial advisor does is have the knowledge of different financial instruments and pair it with your situation right? An LLM would do that extremely well but can also do it more often. not once a year appointments. You could have active portfolio management for a negligible fee.

Who accepts the liability when the LLM does its typical occasional massive judgement fuck up? Asking that because even the very best, commercially available, state of the art LLMs (presently Claude Opus 4.7 (1M) with Max effort enabled) still occasionally fucks up its decisions and judgement in significant ways. So, it's kind of horrifying to me that people would consider this for actually potentially life-impacting…

Yeah, investing over time in such a way to beat the S&P is actually incredibly challenging (having tried it myself). I’m very skeptical an LLM can do better than that unless it has a very large, expensive firehose of data.

It may be that more mundane analysis ends up being the most useful. For example — for years, we had some money in a money market fund earning basically no interest. It just wasn’t on the radar.

Had even a not very smart LLM nudged us to put the money into a HYSA earlier, we would have made thousands per year in interest.

My wife also recently used our tool to do some simple investing optimization that’s going to save us a few thousand per year on taxes.

Thing like this aren’t sexy but do have value, and don’t take GPT Pro.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#132
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share more about how it works?

You link your accounts in simplefin which uses MX (similar to plaid) to pull the data. Except simplefin is really simple to setup. https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/simplefin

Nice, thanks for sharing. I’m curious how MX compares to Plaid.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#133
post #127
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty straightforward! There's a widget in the app that you auth through, and then you give consent for the data pull through Plaid. This authorizes the connection, and then webhooks come in going forward as data changes. For the non-Plaid assets eg., home, car, etc., we just added custom asset MCP tools so you can manually add those and they're included in your computed net worth.

I’ve been using driggsby for the past couple of days and it is pretty neat! What is your plan for accounts with banks not supported by plaid? Also, is there a plan to retain daily investment balance so users can track performance?

Great questions.

On banks not supported by Plaid — while most are covered already (12,000+), totally understand that some like Fidelity aren’t. For this, we’re considering a way to manually import statements, but that wouldn’t support the live data sync that Plaid provides of course.

Performance tracking — yes! Absolutely on this. We’ve been sketching this out lately since it has some nuance to get right. Would love your input on what you’d like to see here.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#134

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.

Even better, a privacy.com card for each subscription!

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#135
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is still the case? When we built our Plaid integration it used OAuth and a redirect. Plaid just got an access token, you enter your user/pass at bank side. Edit: Seems like smaller/local banks are probably the ones that won't support OAuth. We didn't support those.

Correct. That’s interesting — so you explicitly opted out for any non-OAuth institutions?

This was B2B SaaS for large networks of ambulatory centers to manage/pay their vendors. The banks that were in scope were only the ones they used -- each one of the big names (and around half of them Bank of America).

Can see it being more of an issue if it were a B2C finance app.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#137

I was in this same situation a couple of months ago and I just sat down with my friend who is now my co-founder to https://neospend.com we both were having this issues and now we don’t anymore. Check it out.

Looks neat! Thanks for sharing. This is going to be a space with many different players, which I personally think is awesome.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#138
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's rather hard because of their security & contractual requirements -- we had to sign a contract with them, go through security review, and so on.

We just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, I posted some details below. Actually, as part of publicizing our new hobbyist-friendly onboarding, we're looking to work with hobbyists who have created Plaid-powered apps and would be interested in making a short video about their app and their Plaid experience to potentially be featured on the Plaid blog -- if y…

Awesome. Definitely need to highlight this better somewhere on the main page (probably /pricing and in the /docs pages), but https://dashboard.plaid.com/ has it. More vague plans right now.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#139

We (Era Finance) have a solution for exactly this - Era Context, an MCP for connecting any compatible agent to your personal finances - https://era.app It's focussed on read tools at the moment, but we have write tools coming (money transfers, debt paydown, etc) Check it out and let me know if you'd like to see any particular features landing - just email alex at the above domain name. For background context I'm Alex…

I just tried it and am floored by what it can do. Will be making it part of my routine. Kudos to you and your team!

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#140
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…

How does Tiller get your transaction data from your bank? Do they pull it through Plaid and the like? It's been a while since I checked them out. Does it still entail entrusting Plaid with your web banking user credentials? How's 2FA handled? Does Plaid still rely on screen scraping for certain financial institutions who lack formal API's? What happens if there's a bug and they inadvertently click something they shou…

One trick I've seen, is that some banks will send notification emails/texts to warn about transactions over a certain amount, in case you card was stolen and to warn you. The hack then is to set that to "warn" you of transactions over $0.01, which gets you a notification stream of all transactions. From there it's a small matter of forwarding that information to your system for processing.
Post reply on HN